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 The top chipmaker said its equity investment in Cloudera makes it
the company's single largest strategic shareholder and it comes as
Intel looks to expand its server business to make up for falling
sales of personal computers.
Intel said the stake in Cloudera is its largest data center
technology investment ever, although it did not disclose the size of
the deal.
Cloudera, like rivals HortonWorks and Pivotal, focuses on helping
corporate customers manage data through "Hadoop," an open-source
software system that can sort and handle the massive amounts of
information, increasingly called Big Data, generated through the
Internet and mobile devices.
Intel said it will promote Cloudera's Hadoop platform and transition
away from its own customized version that it had been promoting as
optimal for Intel server chips.
Cloudera will now engineer its Hadoop offerings to work best with
Intel's server chip technology, which enjoys around 94 percent
market share in data centers.
Intel will have a seat on the board of directors of Cloudera, which
is widely expected to go public this year.
Shares of Intel were unchanged at $25.38.
Intel hopes that encouraging more companies to leap into Big Data
analysis will lead to higher sales of its high-end Xeon server
processors.
With Intel's core market of personal computers shrinking, the
chipmaker's server business is becoming a larger component of the
company's profits. But its growth has recently fallen short of
expectations.
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Big Data is also a key part of the Internet of Things, a term
referring to the increasing connectivity of everyday devices from
cars to smoke alarms.
Finding ways to analyze and make use of vast amounts of data
collected by those smart devices is becoming a major opportunity for
IT companies including Intel.
After falling behind in making chips for smartphones and tablets,
Intel aims to make sure it is a major player in the Internet of
Things by supplying processors used in new devices as well as the
server hardware and software used to analyze the data those devices
create.
"Hadoop, as the data platform, and the investment we are making
together to make sure it's the platform of choice, becomes the
connection between those two major initiatives at Intel: the
Internet of Things and the data center," Diane Bryant, senior vice
president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, said on
a webcast.
Intel's investment comes after Cloudera said last week raised $160
million from T Rowe Price, Google Ventures and other investors.
(Reporting by Noel Randewich; editing by Andrew Hay)
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