The company founded to provide enterprise-level support to users of Apache Hadoop - Cloudera released its first commercial product, the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop, on Monday. Cloudera announced that it has closed a $5 million round of Series A financing led by Accel Partners.

Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, said, "We're fortunate to have Accel Partners as our venture capital partner as well as the financial support of some of the most respected and successful private investors and technology executives in high technology. We believe that Hadoop is a disruptive new technology for mining valuable business information in the enormous streams of new data generated in enterprises today. Processing this kind of big data has been too expensive or too technically difficult for all but the most sophisticated IT organizations until now. Our mission is to use Hadoop to make big data processing capabilities accessible and affordable for all companies."

Ping Li, a partner at Accel Partners, said, "Cloudera has critical elements that we look for in category-defining companies -- a world-class founding team, great technology, and a disruptive and large market opportunity. Cloudera is uniquely positioned to bring the power of Hadoop to businesses, whether it be a scale out implementation inside a modern enterprise or harnessing the benefits of a hosted cloud solution." Li has also joined the Cloudera board of directors.

Cloudera was founded with a mission to fetch the power of Hadoop to big and small organizations. Hadoop offers a robust new way to manage and mine vast volumes of information. It is the data processing engine behind some of the largest and most popular Web sites of the world.

Cloudera was founded in late 2008 by leading experts on big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo!. The founding team of Cloudera include Michael Olson - former CEO of Sleepycat Software, Dr. Amr Awadallah - co-founder of VivaSmart, Christophe Bisciglia from Google, and Jeff Hammerbacher - an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners. The other members of Cloudera include Aaron Kimball, Tom White, Philip Zeyliger, Alex Loddengaard, Aaron Newton, Matt Massie, and Todd Lipcon.