Mike Olson of Cloudera on the Intel relationship:
It genuinely is true that the important story here is the commercial relationship we’ve crafted with Intel. We go to market together, and that’s fantastic for us both—we reach many more customers directly and through our partners. We build better software that takes advantage of Intel silicon innovations, and get it into the open source sooner. Our customers get the best product earlier and get more value from their data.
And then Matt Asay to drive the point home:
By claiming $740 million of Intel’s money, Cloudera now has its attention in a big way. The cash is nice, but it’s the relationship that matters.
The official Cloudera press release on the $900m round puts Intel’s stake at 18%.
Also, Matt Aslett over at 451 has an analysis on who Cloudera might acquire with that pile of cash:
While we expect Cloudera’s M&A strategy to be driven by products that complement Cloudera Manager, we also see opportunities for the company to purchase vendors and technologies that complement the core Hadoop distribution. At this level, we are not talking so much about Cloudera wanting to ‘own’ Hadoop-related projects in the traditional sense, but to boost its own talent in key areas as well as bring its resources to bear to accelerate adoption.