Intel buys stake in big data firm Cloudera

Intel has made a significant investment in Cloudera, and has made the firm its preferred software partner for big data analytics.

The investment makes Cloudera the tech giant's biggest datacentre partner, although neither company has yet announced how much money the deal is worth.

Cloudera manages data through open-source software Hadoop, meaning Intel will stop using its own in-house developed data management software and move towards Cloudera's open-source offering.

Intel hopes to accelerate customer adoption of big data solutions with the partnership, making it easier for different-sized companies to "obtain increased business value from data by deploying open source Apache Hadoop solutions."

"By aligning the Cloudera and Intel roadmaps, we are creating the platform of choice for big data analytics," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group.

"We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business. This collaboration spans our data center technology from compute to network, security and storage, and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things."

Cloudera will now develop its Hadoop data management software to work with Intel chips, which account for around 94 per cent of the chips used in datacentres today.

Some development will be required by Cloudera including adding support for Intel fabrics, flash memory and security.

Last year, Cloudera launched its unified Enterprise Data Hub as "a place to store and work with all data, with the flexibility to run a variety of enterprise workloads - including batch processing, interactive SQL, enterprise search and advanced analytics."