Sunnyvale, California — Barely days have passed as Microsoft and Yahoo announced a search deal, Yahoo search veteran “Doug Cutting,” the much admired open-source engineer who has led the way in speeding up the processing of huge amounts of data, is leaving Yahoo to join open-source management startup called Cloudera.
Cutting announced his departure Monday on his blog. The decision is the most recent in a stream of search and tech executives leaving, some of the staff leaving for Microsoft, and the move comes less than two weeks after the companies finally sealed their long-awaited search deal.
However, the first sign is that Yahoo has again started losing the top notch team of its search intelligence now that it has ceded its search initiatives to Microsoft leadership.
Cutting, in fact helped develop Hadoop, the open-source technology behind Cloudera’s products, so him leaving to work with the startup full time should not come as a surprise.
Nevertheless, the timing was coincidental, but seems to reflect a mature move, he insisted. In his blog post he expelled fulsome praise on Yahoo and said that at Cloudera he will be “well-positioned to help it mature,” it meaning Hadoop.
Cloudera is, technically a start-up with just 20 employees. The company is focused on making it accessible for a wider group of users than just expert developers. The Hadoop technology is widely considered the most powerful and cost-effective way to manage large amounts of data, store it, and derive intelligence from it.
Already on-board at Cloudera are people like Hardoop co-founder Mike Cafarell, Mike Olson, former chief executive of Sleepy Cat, the open source embedded database engine that was acquired by Oracle; Amr Awadallah, who earlier led Yahoo’s efforts to improve search; Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook employee who led the company’s data and machine learning technology initiatives; and Christophe Bisciglia, who formerly led Google’s cloud computing initiatives and worked on Google’s core data processing technologies, MapReduce and GFS.
Cutting will start as an architect with the company in September. He told the NYT that he disliked the timing of the news, since it could be perceived as a protest against the search deal: “This has been in the works for awhile and is unrelated.”
Cloudera, based in San Francisco, raised $6 million in funding in June. Backers include Accel Partners, former VMware chief executive Diane Greene, former MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos, and Facebook chief financial officer Gideon Yu.