With two major acquisitions announced today — the $420 million acquisition of SpringSource by VMware and Facebook buying Friendfeed for $50 million, I almost forgot to note that two good friends of this blog have switched jobs.
- Doug Cutting, creator of open-source software framework Hadoop,has left Yahoo (s YHOO) to join Cloudera, a Burlingame, Calif.-based startup that is commercializing Hadoop. The center of gravity of the Hadoop ecosystem moved to Cloudera today with the addition of Cutting. I’m not surprised he’s joining the startup: Cloudera is made up of Hadoop believers such as Christophe Bisciglia, who created and led Google’s academic cloud computing initiative; Dr. Amr Awadallah, Yahoo’s former VP of engineering; and Jeff Hammerbacher, formerly of Facebook. It was only a matter of time before Doug joined his peeps.
I first met Doug over a year ago when we hosted our Hadoop meet-up. It was fun to learn about Hadoop and its potential from him. “Going forward, Cloudera presents an opportunity to work with a wider range of Hadoop users. At Cloudera I will be well positioned to help it mature,” he writes on his blog.
- Naveed Anwar, who spent over 12 years at AOL, was a regular fixture at most major web events. In his role as director of AOL’s developer network, he was out trying to get developers to focus on the company. Talk about a thankless job. Now with the company getting ready for a spin-off from parent Time Warner, Anwar has switched jobs. He’s now heading up the developer network at PayPal, where he’s going to do, what else? Get developers to use the PayPal platform.
