Cloudera, a leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, announced a shake-up in its executive lineup this week, starting from the top.

Cloudera CEO Mike Olson is being replaced by Tom Reilly, former CEO of security company ArcSight.  Olson will now serve as Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors.

“With over 30 years of enterprise software experience, I am pleased to welcome Tom to the Cloudera family,” said Olson.  “We have long set the pace for the commercial adoption of Hadoop and with Tom’s leadership and focus Cloudera will accelerate the pace of innovation, continue to deliver growth and extend our market leadership. Today’s announcement reinforces Cloudera’s commitment and investment in the Hadoop open source community and the continued success of open source initiatives.”

Olson and Reilly have collaborated in the past few months to make the transition as seamless as possible.  And this isn’t the first time Cloudera has tapped top execs from other firms.  Last year, the company welcomed Alan Saldich from Riverbed to head up Marketing, Peter Cooper-Ellis from VMware to run Engineering and Jim Frankola out of IBM, Ariba and Yodlee, as CFO.

Reilly serving as Cloudera’s CEO  will allow Olson to concentrate on key constituents such as Cloudera’s product and engineering teams, partners, sales force, customer-facing technical teams and – most importantly – its customers.

“I am extremely excited to join an organization that is transforming an industry and enabling a new class of analytic applications that were previously unaffordable or unattainable with legacy approaches,” said Reilly.  “As the addressable Hadoop market continues to grow and Cloudera positions itself to lead that market with its world-class product suite, I look forward to ensuring solid execution and continued high growth.”

Heading for an IPO

This executive shakeup has some pundits predicting an IPO for Cloudera in the near future.  Reilly served as ArcSight’s CEO when he joined the company in 2006.  After two years in the position, he took the company public.  In 2010, he sold the company to HP for $1.5 billion, a 24 percent premium for shareholders.

It’s not impossible to think that Cloudera is eyeing an IPO so it tapped someone who knows what he’s doing, and was very successful at it in the past.  Cloudera has been in the forefront of cloud computing, Big Data, and analytics, and now that the industry is taking off, it’s about time to go public.

Olson’s Legacy

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.

Olson had 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 handed 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

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.  Then 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 is being utilized 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.

Don’t think that Olson can’t take Cloudera public, he can if he wants to.  He has brought much success to the company in the past years, but it doesn’t hurt to get someone who has done this before in order to secure its success.