Hadoop is hot, Cloudera is 'sexy'

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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image courtesy: freedigitalphotos.net