Big data startup BlueData partners with Intel and takes on $20M

BlueData, a startup with an application companies can use to run big data software like Hadoop and Spark on their existing data center infrastructure, announced today a new $20 million round of funding. The company also announced a major new partnership deal with chipmaker Intel.

“We’ll be optimizing our software on Intel architectures to provide flexible, elastic, high-performance Big Data deployments on-premises,” BlueData cofounder and chief executive Kumar Sreekanti wrote in a blog post on the news. “And we’ll be working together to bring this innovation to our enterprise customers, through ongoing sales and marketing collaboration.”

The deal comes after Intel invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Hadoop distribution vendor Cloudera last year. And earlier this year, Intel announced a partnership with Databricks, the company behind Spark.

BlueData’s technology can integrate with existing file systems other than Hadoop’s native distributed file system, and it can work on top of virtualized infrastructure, which is common in enterprises’ on-premises data centers. BlueData’s software can deploy Hadoop distributions from both Cloudera and Hortonworks. All this means choice when deploying big data software. Economical use of Hadoop and Spark can translate into more chip sales. Hence Intel’s ongoing interest in the startup.

Existing investor Intel Capital led the new round in BlueData. An unnamed new investor is also onboard, as are existing investors Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge, and Ignition Partners.

BlueData started in 2012 and is based in Mountain View, Calif. Customers include Comcast, Orange, and Symantec.

A statement on the news from BlueData is here. Intel has its own blog post on the collaboration here.