“Big data” startup Concurrent has raised $4 million in its first round of funding with a goal to help app developers use Apache Hadoop to build more robust data-intensive applications.

San Franciso-based Concurrent was founded in 2008 and offers a popular open-source product called Cascading, which it claims is the “most widely used and deployed application framework” for building apps with Hadoop. Companies including Twitter, eBay, Etsy, FlightCaster, iCrossing, Razorfish, Trulia, and TeleNav use Cascading.

Today’s investment was led by True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. Combined with seed funding, Concurrent has raised about $5 million in total.

Concurrent also used today’s announcement to reveal that it has appointed Gary Nakamura as its new CEO. Before Concurrent, Nakamura served as SVP and general manager of Terracotta, which was acquired by Software AG in May 2011.

“Our investors’ confidence in Concurrent validates our strategy and the pioneering work we have done since the launch of Cascading in 2008,” Nakamura said in a statement. “This new investment will enable us to build on this foundation and accelerate our growth as we work to deliver our commercial product and grow the core team. I am excited to be joining Concurrent at such a pivotal time and look forward to driving the company’s continued growth and development.”

Hoping to get behind the “big data” trend in the enterprise, Intel said today that it would launch open source data center software of its own in an effort to speed processing for big data applications.

Big data is a buzzword in the enterprise these days, with the potential to transform business models and shake up industries such as health care. But it involves a huge amount of data processing. Sometimes running apps with a terabyte of data on an Apache Hadoop distribution can take four hours, said Intel vice president of architecture group Boyd Davis.

“We’re in an era of generating huge amounts of data,” Davis said. “But the key is what we get out of that.”

So Intel is launching its own Apache Hadoop distribution that is optimized for its solutions. If you apply Intel’s latest Xeon server processors, solid-state memory, expanding the Ethernet speed to 10 gigabits a second — then the result is that the four-hour processing can be reduced to just 7 minutes, Davis said. Intel’s Apache Hadoop distribution will be commercially available, so that its competitiveness will be tested in the market against rival solutions, Davis said.

“We want to accelerate Hadoop,” he said.

Intel wants to provide data for analytics purposes, and it wants to provide a framework to connect and manage devices within a entire corporation in a scalable manner. And Intel will bake Hadoop directly into its server chips so it can improve security via encryption.

Davis said that the Intel-Hadoop distribution should be simple for IT managers because it is configured to take guessing out of the process. Intel has a couple of dozen partners to help deliver its software into the market. Those include Cisco, Dell, and SAP. Intel is also investing in small big data companies, including MongoDB and Guavus Analytics, to build new analytics on Apache Hadoop.

In traditional circles, Hadoop is viewed as a bright but unruly problem child.

Indeed, it is still in the nascent stages of development. However the scores of “big data” startups that leverage Hadoop will tell you that it is here to stay.

Cloudera, the venture-backed startup that ushered the mainstream deployment of Hadoop, has unveiled a new technology at the Hadoop World, the data-focused conference in New York.

Its new product, known as “Impala”, addresses many of the concerns that large enterprises still have about Hadoop, namely that it does not integrate well with traditional business intelligence applications.

“We have heard this criticism,” said Charles Zedlewski, Cloudera’s VP of Product in a phone interview with VentureBeat. “That’s why we decided to do something about it,” he said.

Impala enables its users to store vast volumes of unwieldy data and run queries in HBase, Hadoop’s NoSQL database. What’s interesting is that it is built to maximise speed: it runs on top of Hadoop storage, but speaks to SQL and works with pre-existing drivers.

“If you ask questions, you will get answers ten times faster,” Zedlewski explained.

These answers or “insights” can mitigate risk and inform strategy for a company’s sales, marketing and business development teams.

Travel booking site Expedia is one of the companies that is using Cloudera’s new product to manage four pedabytes of company data.

“We are able to work on one single platform for big data rather than many disparate systems for archiving, ETL and analytics,” said Jeff Prather, Director of Global Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Platforms at Expedia.

“This evolution of Hadoop has enabled us to reduce our latency by 50 percent and produce a new real business insight service not previously viable,” said Prather in a statement.

Cloudera burst onto the scene four years ago. It was among the first to capitalize on the growing popularity of the open source Hadoop framework. (Fun fact: Hadoop was invented by independent programmer Doug Cutting, and shortly thereafter was brought to Yahoo. It was named after his son’s top elephant.)

“The reason why people are attracted to it [Hadoop] is because it’s scalable, extremely flexible, easy to get started with, and inexpensive compared to what else is out there,” said Zedlewski.

Cloudera’s founders used Hadoop for the purposes of data analysis and business intelligence. For developers, Hadoop is free to download under the Apache software license, but the company sells a broad spectrum of technical support services.

The Silicon Valley-based company has signed on business intelligence partners to test the product, including Tableau and QlikTech. (Learn more in our inaugural list of top “big data” companies). It will bring in revenue through this new product by charging customers for support services.

Cloudera has 400 employees and has over $76 million of venture funding in the bank. Cloudera’s chief scientist, Jeff Hammerbacher, conceived and led Facebook’s data team.

Cloudera provides its own take on Hadoop’s powerful open-source data management software and couples it with IT support and management. Using Hadoop, enterprises can store and process huge amounts of unstructured data. But Hadoop can often be unwieldy and difficult to manage, so Cloudera helps make it possible to manage that data effectively.

“Any company with a data-intensive environment is probably using Hadoop in some form,” Cloudera COO Kirk Dunn told VentureBeat. “Whether those companies have sought out Hadoop training or management solutions, we’re the company people are looking to and the leaders in this space by any metric.”

The new $40 million funding round was led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel.

“Cloudera is the defining company in the big data industry and the popularity of Hadoop is increasing every day,” said Artale, in a statement. “The Big Data space is moving fast — we looked at many investment opportunities and chose Cloudera due to their clear leadership. The team and its technology are the best in this business and we are excited to be part of it.”

Cloudera also announced today that it has partnered with storage and data solutions company NetApp. The two companies have created the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop, which combines Cloudera’s wide-ranging Hadoop distribution with a NetApp-constructed RAID architecture. It’s a big deal for enterprise customers seeking to put more power behind Hadoop and customized data processing and management efforts.

“This gives NetApp’s customers the ability to process new data and existing data and that data together, which hasn’t been possible before,” Dunn said.

Cloudera is on a roll when it comes to funding, and its total raised, including today’s round, now stands at an impressive $76 million. It raised a $25 million round a year ago with funding led by Meritech Capital Partners and previous investors Accel and Greylock. Before that, it raised $6 million in June 2009 and $5 million in March 2009.

Datameer

The company created a user dashboard to easily feed and analyze data into Apache Hadoop, an open-source software that processes large amounts of data sets and spits out analytics as well as reporting. The benefit of the tool comes to those that don’t have a technical background and thus wouldn’t be able to use Apache Hadoop.

Companies in several industries have needs to process large amounts of data, including  financial services, Internet research, telecommunications and security software.

Several other companies are storing and processing large amounts of data for companies with the help of Apache Hadoop, including Cloudera and OSIsoft Software.

The San Mateo, California-based company, founded in 2009, secured the round of funding from legendary venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from Redpoint Ventures. The total funding to date is $12 million.

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