While gadget geeks drool over the latest launches from Mobile World Congress this week, O’Reilly Media’s Strata gathering looks at the data-hungry, data-sharing, data-loving economy behind all those smartphones, tablets and Smart Apps showcased at MWC.  For Big Data enthusiasts, Strata is one of the most provocative conferences around. We’ll bring you the Strata experience right here on TheCube, SiliconANGLE’s premier video production program.  We’re broadcasting live at the Strata Conference on February 26-28, 2013.

At Strata, TheCube hosts, SiliconANGLE CEO and founder John Furrier and Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante, will be sitting down with some of Big Data’s most prominent figures, including the likes of Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera.

A Berkley grad school alum, Olson made his mark as the CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB – the open source embedded database engine.  The project served Olson well, going on to be acquired by Oracle in 2006.  He served as Oracle’s Vice President for Embedded Technologies for two years, before teaming up with Google, Yahoo and Facebook engineers, Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah and Jeff Hammerbacher respectively, to start Cloudera.

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Back to the Beginning…

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This will not be Olson’s first time at TheCube: he sat down with Furrier and Vellante a number of times, always ready to talk shop about Hadoop, the popular framework that’s shaped the Big Data industry as we know it.  As Hadoop matured significantly over the past two years, so too has the Big Data industry.  Olson and Cloudera were some of Hadoop’s earliest service providers, building an enterprise-ready consultancy around Hadoop implementation.

The Cloudera CEO has a unique vantage point on Hadoop’s evolution, going all the way back to its origins, the types of problems it solves, and the types of customers that utilizes it.

“Back in the day, if you had a data problem, if you needed to run business analytics, you wrote the biggest check you could to Sun Microsystems, and you bought a great big single-box central server.  Any money that was left over, you handled to Oracle for database licenses, and you installed that database on that box, and that was where you went for data.  That was your temple of information” Olson said during one visit to TheCube (video below).  “There’s a problem with that strategy, and that is, data is growing faster than computers are getting bigger.  That means, that in the long term, you can no longer have one box with all your data.”

In an interview with Bloomberg, Olson stated that web properties were the ones who discovered the Big Data problem.  As more people connect to the internet, visit sites, and generate data, these web properties saw the potential of better understanding consumers if there was a way to capture, mine and interpret all the data gathered.  Thus, the birth of Big Data.

Big Data brings radical changes to the data center

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It’s brought on a massive shift in IT infrastructure, stretching the data center and the imagination alike.  Big Data has caused a paradigm shift in the way we think about everything; literally changing the way we think.  That requires new architecture, new methods of managing data and new ways of leveraging people.

“The data center is undergoing a pretty radical transformation now, with new data streaming into elastic and cloud infrastructure, ubiquitous virtualization and new platforms like Hadoop for tough problems,” Olson says in an earlier interview. “We need to help customers make that transition.”

Cloudera’s approach with Big Data has been groundbreaking, especially when it comes to enterprise adoption.  It has been a preferred platform in managing Big Data with open source Hadoop.  Because of this, Cloudera has received over $140 million in funding since it launched.  In 2009, the startup received $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and $6 million in Series B funding from Greylock Partners with the participation of Accel.  Raised $25 million in a Series C funding led by Meritech Capital Partners with the participation of Accel and Greylock.  $40 million in Series D funding led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners and joined by existing investors Accel, Greylock, Meritech, and In-Q-Tel.  And finally, in December 2012, Cloudera closed $65 million in Series E funding led by Accel with the participation of Greylock, Ignition, Meritech, and In-Q-Tel.

The latest round of funding will be used to expand sales and support operations to meet increasing enterprise demand for Clouder’a’s real-time, Hadoop-based platform, to address the global market.

Stay tuned for Mike Olson’s next appearance on TheCube, and discover the latest buzz on Cloudera, Hadoop and Big Data.