Enterprise CIOs and institutional investors alike are flocking to the Big Data camp as the industry drives new and increasingly compelling use cases for exploiting the vast amounts of heterogeneous information being generated today. Nowhere is this explosive interest more evident than in the Hadoop ecosystem, where Cloudera has just secured a massive $160 million in funding to fuel its quest for dominance.

The round, the company’s seventh since launch, was led by T. Rowe Price and three other unnamed “top-tier public market investors.” The mutual funds giant has a keen eye for spotting startups with multi-billion dollar IPO potential, and boasts a proven track record that includes Facebook, Twitter and Zynga. Its participation puts a seal of approval on Cloudera’s efforts to transform Hadoop into truly viable solution for the enterprise, and hints at the possibility that the company might be eyeing its own public offering in the next few years. If that indeed is the case then it’s in for a tough fight with rival MapR, which is making big strides towards becoming the world’s first publicly traded pure-play distributor despite having considerably less working capital.

The new funding also includes investments by Google Ventures and an unspecified affiliate of MSD, the private investment firm of industry titan Michael Dell. Cloudera disclosed that it will use the financing to further the adoption and development of Hadoop and promote its vision for the Enterprise Data Hub, which co-founder and CFO Amr Awadallah outlined in detail on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE.

“The way we look at this is: there’s an existing market called the EDW market, the enterprise data warehouse market, We’re saying now there’s a new market called the enterprise data hub (EDH) market. So there’s EDW and EDH,” Awadallah explained. “Us, Cloudera, being the very first leaders of this movement, we are naming that, that is the name of our market.” To maintain this momentum, the company will allocate a large portion of the capital from its latest round to expand services and support capabilities, boost engineering and scaling field operations in Europe and Asia. MapR is doing the same, recently opening its fourth Asia Pacific office in Seoul.

Another high-profile Hadoop firm to have landed funding this week is Platfora, which bagged $38 million from Tenaya Capital, Citi Ventures, Cisco and Allegis Capital. Equally notable prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s VC arm, also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total raised to $65 million.

Platfora develops business intelligence software that makes it possible to visualize information directly in HDFS without having to export it to a disparate tool. That significantly reduces data movement, slashing the costs associated with the loading process and allowing users to glean insights while the potential opportunities are still fresh and actionable.

“Enterprises are awash in data but are struggling to gain useful insights. While intuition is critical in business, business executives readily admit that they are still making too many gut decisions because they cannot adequately access or analyze all of their data to make better informed decisions,” Platfora CEO Ben Werther said in a statement released this morning. “With our big data analytics platform, we’re helping organizations participate and win in the Fact-based Economy which we estimate will unlock $5 trillion in new value in the next 10 years through novel uses of big data.” The firm will use the new funding to bring in fresh talent and grow its share of this expanding market.

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