Cloudera Snags Google Infrastructure Ace for Top Engineering Role

Cloudera, an enterprise analytic data management provider powered by Apache Hadoop has named former Google infrastructure expert Daniel Sturman vice president of engineering. Sturman, who used to be compute lead at Google, will direct development efforts at Cloudera, including accelerating hybrid cloud adoption and deepening partner relations and technical solutions, the company announced this week.

Sturman has a combination of database and distributed compute platform experience and comes from a company that provided early foundation for Hadoop.

“Daniel brings to Cloudera an ideal blend of database and distributed compute platform experience,” Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said in a press release. “The original design concepts for Apache Hadoop and many of the ensuing innovative analytic projects originate from Google."

Cloudera has a rich ecosystem, including tight relations with Intel, the company’s largest strategic shareholder. In 2014, Cloudera raised $160 million in a round that included Google Ventures, the internet giant's venture-capital arm.

Sturman was previously engineering lead at Google, a company with one of the biggest data center networks on the planet. During his eight years working on Google infrastructure, Sturman ensured that the underlying compute systems for all Google workloads were reliable, predictable, and efficient both on-premise and in the cloud, according to Cloudera.

He was responsible for several Google Cloud Platform products, including Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine Platform-as-a-Service, Kubernetes, and Google Container Engine.

Prior to Google, he headed development for IBM’s DB2 relational database products and identified emerging technology trends for IBM’s software group.

“We are excited to have a Google technology leader who understands modern architectures and the art of turning data into insight take our platform to the next level,” said Reilly. “His background leading teams in running one of the world’s largest fleets of computers, his understanding of open source, distributed computing, and cloud platforms, coupled with his successful track record of delivering enterprise-grade software will bring immense value to Cloudera as we continue our high growth and deploy transformative Big Data applications in both traditional enterprises and the cloud.”

In a statement, Sturman said the world was standing on the brink of incredible changes in the way value is extracted from data.