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When I first met Cloudera<\/a> CEO Tom Reilly in 2015\u00a0at the Intel Capital Summit, we were about to go on stage for a fireside chat to discuss among other things Intel\u2019s massive investment in his company.<\/p>\n While on stage, the conversation inevitably turned to when the company might go public. As you might expect, he gave me the standard startup CEO answer. While Cloudera was certainly of sufficient size to IPO, they had just raised over a billion dollars and had plenty of cash. He was willing to wait until, in his words, \u201cwhen we feel it\u2019s the right time.\u201d<\/p>\n Apparently it was yesterday when the company filed its S-1 paperwork<\/a> with the SEC indicating its plans to go public. The announcement had been rumored for some time<\/a>, and made sense, especially given\u00a0the number of enterprise tech companies that have gone public<\/a>\u00a0 (or announced their intentions to do so) recently.<\/p>\n As we\u2019ve seen, in the first quarter of this year, enterprise tech IPOs are suddenly a hot commodity with Alteryx<\/a> and MuleSoft<\/a> already having gone out, and Cloudera joining Yext<\/a> and Okta<\/a> as the next ones up in the queue.<\/p>\n In spite of the name, Cloudera isn\u2019t really a cloud company, at least in the pure sense. It\u2019s a commercial product built on top of the open source Hadoop project<\/a>, the one with the cute elephant for a mascot. In spite of the cuteness, Hadoop is very serious technology used to process massive amounts of data, which should come in increasingly handy in a world with increasing amounts data to deal with \u2014 often\u00a0referred to in industry parlance\u00a0as \u201cbig data\u201d.<\/p>\n Photo: Christian Heilmann<\/a> on Flickr. Used under CC by 2.0 license.<\/p>\n The problem is that while Hadoop may be a powerful way to process that\u00a0data, and it may be available as open source, it is not simple to use. That\u2019s where companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks, which went public in 2014<\/a> come in. These companies, and others like MapR, are attempting to package Hadoop in a way that makes it more consumable for large organizations.<\/p>\n While Hortonworks came strong out of the gate<\/a> after its IPO, it has not fared all as well since. After a high of over $27 in July, 2015, it was under $10 a share<\/a>\u00a0as of the close on Friday.<\/p>\n But just because two or more companies share the same market doesn\u2019t mean they each share the same fate or are even completely comparable beyond both being Hadoop vendors.<\/p>\n Carl Olofson, an analyst at IDC, says there are some fundamental differences between the two companies. He describes Hortonworks as a \u201cpure open source company,\u201d one that packages, coordinates and manages that open source as a product for a subscription fee, and also sells support. He says the company\u2019s products are aimed mostly at \u201cbig data technologists.\u201d<\/p>\n Cloudera is a bit different, he says. \u201c[It] offers packages that are mostly open source, but with tooling that is proprietary, and that are aimed at various classes of business problems. They sell to business managers. So their approach is different, and as a result, they have a higher percentage of their income derived from software than does Hortonworks,\u201d Olofson told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n One of Cloudera\u2019s chief investors was none other than Intel, which sank $740 million into the company<\/a>\u00a0in a single investment in March, 2014, obviously seeing some serious potential to take such a substantial stake. And as you would expect, the S-1 revealed Intel and Cloudera have a special relationship and a deep partnership, and that too could give it additional investor credibility as it heads into the public markets.<\/p>\n Certainly Reilly thought so in our interview saying, \u201cWhile everyone focused on the dollars behind the investment that Intel made, what was so important to us was the partnership, and the value that Intel brings us as a partner goes way beyond the dollars they gave us.\u201d The S-1included <\/a>multiple examples of the two companies working together including developing a way to speed\u00a0up encryption at the chip level and launching\u00a0an open source cybersecurity project\u00a0called Apache Spot<\/a>, a platform for advanced threat detection using artificial intelligence and machine learning.<\/p>\n Cloudera\u2019s has been around since 2008, and the market should appreciate\u00a0that longevity\u00a0says Olofson. \u201cCompared to others, Cloudera could be seen as a relatively mature player, with steady growth, a good market position and significant momentum,\u201d he said. While markets can be fickle, it could be that this is finally Cloudera\u2019s moment.<\/p>\nSeparating from the pack<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nThe Intel connection<\/h2>\n