Cloudera Snags Senior Google Tech Exec To Lead Its Development Efforts

Having snagged one of Google's leading cloud infrastructure engineers, data analytics software vendor Cloudera is now in an even stronger position to bring the powerful Hadoop analytics platform to businesses big and small, according to one Cloudera partner.

Daniel Sturman, who oversaw the infrastructure underlying Google's entire cloud platform as vice president of engineering at the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant, will be instrumental in helping Cloudera make Hadoop easier to deploy and use for gleaning insights from massive quantities of data, said Casey Green, executive vice president of business development at Avalon Consulting LLC, a Cloudera partner based in Dallas.

For that reason, hiring Sturman is a significant personnel win for the Palo Alto-based analytics vendor that in six years has become a major player in bringing Hadoop to the enterprise, Green told CRN. Cloudera is likely valued at close to $5 billion, according to some reports.

[Related: Is Google Reigniting The Cloud Price Wars?]

"While at Google, Daniel Sturman led efforts to lower the entry level to cloud computing with Google Cloud and Google App Engine," Green said via email. "By adding Sturman to its team, Cloudera is making a savvy move to position themselves further to innovate in making Hadoop easier."

Sturman, as Cloudera's vice president of engineering, will lead all the company's development efforts and help advance a technology inspired by work initially done at Google.

Avalon, a big-data specialist that sets up Cloudera and Apache Hadoop clusters for customers, works with several analytics vendors. In recent years, the solution provider has seen the progressive impact Cloudera has had in simplifying Hadoop through software it offers on top of the analytics framework, Green said.

As the Hadoop ecosystem expands, it's increasingly important to ease deployment in the cloud or on-premise, Green said.

Sturman spent eight years at Google working on the underlying compute infrastructure and playing a large role in Google's shift to becoming a cloud services provider. Before that, Sturman headed database development at IBM.

’We’re standing on the brink of something incredible in how the world extracts value from data," Sturman said in a statement. "To fill a role that is of unique importance to a market leader for such a transformation, such as, Cloudera, is something I’ve always imagined I would do.’

PUBLISHED JUNE 15, 2015