Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. 80+ news clips. 4,000+ blog mentions. 1.5 million reached. 2,000% increase in web traffic.

Download PDF

Overview

Cloudera, an Accel Partners-funded enterprise software startup, is the commercial provider of the open source Apache Hadoop project, a powerful technology used to process and analyze massive amounts of data. Born out of a project at Google, Hadoop has been used internally at Amazon, Facebook, and Yahoo! for years. In October 2008, Cloudera formed as a company with the mission of making big data processing accessible and affordable for companies of all sizes.

Business Goals

Although Cloudera closed its first round of funding in fall 2008 with coverage in the technology startup blogs, the company was not well known. Hadoop was starting to garner some attention in the trade press, but had not yet broken through into the mainstream. For the launch of its distribution for Hadoop, Cloudera sought to raise the visibility of Hadoop and accelerate its adoption in the enterprise. That meant promotion of both Hadoop as a technology and Cloudera as the go-to company for commercial Hadoop.

Strategy and Tactics (The Page One Process)

For the launch of the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop, Page One PR designed a coordinated campaign, combining a traditional media approach with social media engagement. Our primary goal was to raise awareness of Hadoop in general and to put Cloudera in the middle of those stories and online conversations. There were many individual components that all fit into the larger plan of the launch. With a number of moving parts, preparations began in early January for the mid-March launch.

• Page One PR drafted messaging and positioning statements based on early conversations with the founders;
• Page One PR pitched and secured briefings with the industry’s top analysts. Briefings were held three weeks prior to the launch date;
• Page One PR wrote two press releases, one focused on the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop and the other essentially re-announcing the company’s recent round of funding;
• Page One PR filmed, edited and produced a video featuring the CEO and founder discussing the value proposition of the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. The video was carefully scripted based on the messaging. After completion, it was used to promote both Hadoop as a leading technology and Cloudera as the company bringing it to the enterprise;
• Page One PR helped Cloudera create a screencast of the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop to give a technical demonstration to developers of how the product worked;
• Page One PR helped Cloudera write a blog post highlighting the technical features of the product;
• Page One PR created a targeted media list and pitched reporters and bloggers with customized angles for each person, individually catered to their interest, personality and related coverage (if any). We provided early access to different resources based on interest;
• Page One PR helped Cloudera promote the news on Twitter and made recommendations on engagement strategy.

The entire process – from initial plans through last interview – was carefully crafted and organized. Each component had a role in the overall launch plan. The initial development of communications messages laid the groundwork for a coordinated media effort.

Challenges

Hadoop is a new technology that bridges the gap between two different aspects of data management: storage and processing. These functions have traditionally been accomplished using a combination of products. Thus, Hadoop requires thinking about data in a new way – it presents a new programming paradigm. As a result, one of Cloudera’s primary tasks was to educate the market. Cloudera needed to change the traditional ways of thinking about data and demonstrate how much easier and cost-effective the use of Hadoop can be in solving enterprise data problems traditionally solved at great expense and with little flexibility by big relational database, ETL and data mining vendors.

One of the challenges facing Cloudera was that the only companies using this new type of technology were large web properties such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! These companies had a fire hose of user-generated data (petabytes) streaming into their systems daily, presenting both a computing and data management problem, as well as a monetization opportunity given the right tools. These companies had top engineers hired specifically to solve this data explosion problem, a resource luxury that “regular” enterprises do not have.

Results

On launch day, Cloudera exploded on the scene of mainstream press, the technology community, and online. Cloudera reached 1.5 million people within 24 hours, increasing website traffic by more than 2,000 percent.

Page One PR secured a feature story focused on Hadoop that appeared both online and in the print edition of The New York Times. While the focus was on the technology, Cloudera was positioned as the company bringing Hadoop to the enterprise. Another extended feature on Cloudera ran in The New York Times Bits blog the day after the launch. Page One PR also placed a story about Cloudera’s product and funding in the popular technology blog, TechCrunch, which drove the most traffic to the Cloudera website.

Page One PR placed stories in CNET, Dow Jones, Fast Company, and many developer and IT focused publications and blogs; more than 30 unique stories in total ran on launch day. The video and screencast that Page One PR produced and distributed received 17,000 views. Twitter alone pushed the news to more than 250,000 people, including tweets about Hadoop and Cloudera from Tim O’Reilly (with 100,000+ followers), Robert Scoble (90,000+ followers), John Battelle (16,000 followers), and James Governor (6,000 followers).