The funding amount is huge, but hardly surprising. Cloudera, with roughly $100 million in annual revenue,  is the belle of the of the big data ball. Its Hadoop distribution serves as the distributed storage and processing platform for many of the big data ecosystems that companies large and small are deploying.  It’s also the basis for a growing collection of applications and services that aim to make big data an easier process for companies and their employees that don’t want to manage a large computing cluster and learn the intricacies of the MapReduce processing framework.But it has plenty of competition including bitter rival MapR and Yahoo spinoff Hortonworks, so it can’t stand still.

The funding round was led by Accel Partners with help from Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel, and Meritech Capital Partners — all existing backers. Some of the money will go towards opening a new European headquarters in the UK, in the first quarter of next year, the company said.

As Derrick Harris explained in a brief Hadoop-market summary Cloudera has about 300 employees and is growing fast. But the company also faces huge pressure from the aforementioned competitors. Hortonworks  has raised $50 million in just over a year and is growing steadily — and MapR, which sells a semi-proprietary version of the Hadoop Distributed File System that it, and its customers, claim is superior to the open source version pushed by the other two companies.

Cloudera was founded four years ago by Jeff Hammerbacher of Facebook, and Amr Awadallah of Yahoo and Olsen of Oracle. Christophe Bisciglia of  Google, another co-founder, left the company.

This new round comes atop a $40 million round in November, 2011; $25 million in 2010, and another $6 million  in 2009 bringing the company’s total to $141 million raised.

Olson said in the the press release announcing the investment that the company will use it to grow its sales and support team. That’s a smart decision: Analysts predict the Hadoop market will be worth nearly a $1 billion  soon enough, and that’s possibly and underestimation.

Cloudera needs to be able to capitalize on that increased budget by helping customers build their Hadoop environments better and faster, and probably help them develop some custom applications as well, or risk ceding that valuable business to smaller, nimbler and more cutting-edge consultants and startups

Derrick Harris contributed to this story.

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