Cloudera’s Mike Olson Hands Over CEO Reins

The Hadoop distro world saw a significant shakeup yesterday, as Mike Olson announced in a blog post yesterday that he is stepping down as CEO of Cloudera. He will remain with the company as Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors while the former Arcsight CEO, Tom Reilly, will assume the head role for Cloudera.

Olson stated a desire to focus more on working with customers and developing long-term strategies. In the meantime Reilly as the new CEO will focus on the operational management from which Olson wanted to separate.

“Tom’s appointment as CEO,” Olson wrote on Cloudera’s website, “allows me to concentrate my time with key constituents: Our product and engineering teams, our partners, our sales force, our customer-facing technical teams and – most importantly – our customers themselves.”

While Olson’s new roles are certainly interesting in their own right, it is also worth noting that he has plucked a plethora of industry talent from various companies over the last year. That includes Peter Cooper-Ellis from VMware to run engineering on the technical side as well as hiring Riverbed’s Alan Saldich and IBM’s Jim Frankola for Director of Marketing and CFO respectively.

As CEO and one of the co-founders of Cloudera, Olson’s hope is that he leaves the Hadoop company in capable hands. According to Olson, “[Reilly] led Arcsight through its IPO to industry leadership in mission-critical, bet-the-business security. He knows the enterprise. He’s a been-there, done-that executive. He’s run very successful enterprise software companies at global scale.”

The confidence and the experience of the new CEO are certainly shown there, as is expected for an announcement of this magnitude. It is too early to tell what this means for potential future initiatives for the company. What is known, however, is that with the huge growth seen in the big data industry over the last couple of years, Cloudera will of course be keen to remain near the top of the Hadoop table.

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