Cloudera built a business on free software named after a toy elephant. Hadoop let companies spread enormous data sets across racks of cheap servers and query them all at once. Banks, phone carriers and retailers wanted that power, but few knew how to run it. Cloudera sold them a supported version, plus the people to make it work. When it went public in April 2017, big data was a boardroom phrase and the cloud giants were moving in.

Hadoop for Everyone Else

Cloudera was incorporated in June 2008 and based in Palo Alto, California. Its founders came from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, where engineers had learned to handle data at web scale. Mike Olson, Amr Awadallah, Christophe Bisciglia and Jeff Hammerbacher bet that ordinary companies would soon face the same flood. They gave away the core software. Cloudera charged for subscriptions, management tools and support.

Sixteen Dollars a Share

Cloudera priced at $15 a share on April 27, 2017, above its $12 to $14 range, and raised about $225 million. It closed its first day on the NYSE near $18, up about 20 percent. In January 2019 it merged with Hortonworks, its closest Hadoop rival. Growth slowed as customers moved data to cloud services. In 2021 KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice took Cloudera private for $16 a share, about $5.3 billion.

Cover: The Elephant, Martin Schongauer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an elephant (Hadoop's mascot).