Just ahead of the third annual Hadoop Summit, which kicks off later this morning in San Jose, Cloudera revealed that it has  closed the unprecedented $900 million round of funding it announced back in March. The financing includes a $160 million investment led by financial giant T. Rowe Price and another $740 million thrown in by Intel, which increased its stake of the firm by 18 percent and appointed its CIO, Kim Stevenson, to the board.

While it may seem like an unusual investing decision at first,  Wikibon Senior Analyst Jeff Kelly pointed out in a recent column on SiliconANGLE that the move represents a well thought out strategic push by the chip maker.

Intel has a vested interest in seeing enterprise adoption of Hadoop continue to accelerate at the current pace: the open source batch processing framework is built from the ground up to run on low-cost servers that incorporate its x86  chip architecture. And the explosive growth of unstructured data is only driving more demand for commodity hardware, with many production clusters already numbering in the thousands of nodes. Added up, that translates into a lot of business for Intel and its partners.

The investment in Cloudera, therefore, is about much more than just equity. In fact, it was announced as part of a “broad strategic technology and business collaboration” between the two companies meant to, among other things,  further cement the dominant place of the chip maker’s Xeon  server processor family in the data center amid increased competition from ARM.

The partnership is just as significant for Cloudera, according to Kelly. While it didn’t commit to a full-fledged reseller agreement, Intel has abandoned the development of its homegrown Hadoop platform and started promoting the company’s platform instead, a gambit that he predicts will spur adoption among traditional enterprises.  From an ecosystem perspective, the alliance levels the playing field against Hortonworks, which had established channel arrangements with three of the industry’s largest software vendors – Teradata, Microsoft and SAP – in the past year alone.

It’s apparent that, in the grand scheme of things, the financing  is merely one aspect of Intel’s plans for Cloudera in particular and Hadoop in general. But while it may not be the whole picture, the freshly finalized round is important in its own right.  The funding will allow the distributor to comfortably continue on its current growth trajectory for the foreseeable future and fund strategic pivots like the newly announced acquisition of Gazzang, an Austin-based startup that focuses on securing Big Data environments. The deal, the company’s second, comes on the heels of Hortonworks’ purchase of Hadoop data governance specialist XA Secure.

Like XA Secure, the four-year-old Gazzang develops encryption and authentication software aimed at helping organizations protect their sensitive informations. What sets the firm apart is that its solutions work with an especially wide range of analytical technologies, including Cloudera’s flagship Enterprise Data Hub (CDH) and a number of popular databases as well Amazon Elastic MapReduce.  It also maintains a partnership with EMC and VMware spin-off Pivotal to support its  HD Hadoop suite, which competes with CDH.

Cloudera didn’t specify if and how the acquisition, the terms of which were not disclosed, will impact the relationship. But it did reveal that the Gazzang team will assigned to a newly created “Center for Security Excellence”  tasked with addressing customers’ compliance requirements, certifying security products from partners and develop new capabilities for safeguarding data stored in Hadoop.

The deal underscores Cloudera’s increased security focus under CEO Tom Reilly, who took over the reins last June after at several years at the helm of network protection firm ArcSight, which was acquired by HP in 2010 for $1.5 billion.  Since hiring Reilly, the company has launched the free Apache Sentry authorization tool for Hadoop and became an active participant in Project Rhino, an open-source effort initiated by none other than Intel to improve the data protection capabilities of the batch processing framework and popular complementary components.

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