Cloudera new funding of 300 million dollars and the IPO prospect.

The question What is happening with Cloudera? from my blog on February 11,  has now an answer. According to Gigaom:

Cloudera has raised a $160 million round of venture capital, the company announced on Tuesday, led by T. Rowe Price, along with three other public market investors, Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., Michael Dell’s private investment firm. Cloudera has now raised $300 million in venture capital as it marches toward an apparent IPO.

In my article of February 11, I noticed an influx of "ivory tower" engineers and employee, but the company did not develop a Super Founder leader and their mission was to teach the world Hadoop. I do have a lot of respect for Cloudera engineers, for example Daniel Templeton, ex-Sun who is one the best  technical expert I ever worked with. Probably they are many more like him in Cloudera.

It seems the idea to go IPO , according to  CEO Tom Reilly

“Going public is not an event — it’s a long process and we still have a lot of work to do. Our CFO is still closing his books on Quickbooks,”

But why would an investor buy Cloudera shares when they go public? Google has yearly revenues 33 billion dollars, of which 32 billions  is an advertising income. This means the mighty Google, would have had been a $1 billion per year in sales if they sold their technology alone.

Cloudera wants to sell the EDH, the enterprise data hub,  in every enterprise in the world. If it works, this will be significant , yet it will not be another Google sized company. Because selling technology only, it is not credible to make more than $ 1 billion in sales. Plus the competition from Intel and IBM Pivotal, among many others.

As a humble external blogger I can only say  we need some out-of-the-box thinking. Someone in Cloudera should become a Super-Founder. It is never too late. Perhaps Tom O'Reilly can become one.

Here is hint: rather than having an enterprise only data hub, why not create an agency of virtual organizations where each member can access the data of another member. This is how Open Science Grid (OSG) works, except Cloudera can run this as a business operation. . However here participants are not after capacity, but more data to extract better decisions. This OSG model can also, with a bit of creative dreaming, accommodate advertising revenues.

With 300 million, there are enough money to uplift the Cloudera's EDH to the model EDH OSG-inspired as hinted in the figure below.