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So,
you heard it… Cloudera was the runner-up in ‘Sexiest Enterprise Startup’
category of The Crunchies. The awards were co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch
and aimed to recognize the most compelling startups, internet and technology
innovations of the year. The ‘Sexiest Enterprise Startup’ award category was
added this year where Box bagged the winning honor while Cloudera was honored
with runner-up.
This
is not the first award
that Cloudera got and has made a habit of being at the right place at right
time. Let’s analyze 5 key strategic moves that Cloudera has been making to keep
it continually attractive:
1) Partners:
-
Cloudera has association with some of the best names in the enterprise IT vendor
world. During its initial euphoria Apache Hadoop started off a threat wave to
relational database but today Cloudera seems to have settled to a symbiotic
co-existence with IBM and Oracle products. Similarly, other hardware and
software giants including Dell, HP, CISCO and NetApp add to this prestigious
list of associations. From a wider
ecosystem perspective, Cloudera has 119 partners on last count.
2) Brand Ambassadors:
- If
you are looking for Hadoop evangelists and brand ambassadors, look no further.
Starting with Doug Cutting to the whole list of stars that address key note
events and dominate media, Cloudera today has created many more brand
ambassadors than any other startup in a similar time frame. Olson, Amr, Hammerbacher, Lipcon, White ... this Hadoop ambassador list is
ever expanding and always seems to be adding Cloudera stars.
3) Go East, Go West:
- USA , UK
and then Japan .
Hey wait; are we talking Cars or IT? In a strategic move, Cloudera is one of
the few companies who have established a key presence in Japanese market. Japan
is one of the heavy industrialized nations which utilize IT for automation with
intensive batch jobs. Some of the big names like Toshiba, Fujitsu have done PoC
on Hadoop and Cloudera seems to have noticed that potential early enough.
4) Social Media and Search Engine optimization:
-
Highly optimized website for search engine combined with smart social media
campaigns from the company and individual contributor accounts, Cloudera has
played smartly on digital presence. Unlike MapR which has relied quite a bit on
PPC, Cloudera today has built up its online backlink and referral network
aggressively in the last 2 years.
5) Influencer:
-
There is bright talent pool at Cloudera not just in engineering staff but also
within the Board and Management. While the engineers continue to make forays
out of Cloudera starting up their own new ventures, the executives register
their presence in some key venture funding decisions. Overall, a big big influencer
in entire startup sphere.
The
above points focus on aspects beyond its technical leadership and innovations. Last year, they demonstrated technical brilliance with real time querying in Impala and this year we can expect the momentum to add up with Trevni. Meanwhile, keep following
and stay tuned.
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