Hadoop purveyor MapR Technologies Inc. has shaken up the upper echelons of its executive management team, hiring a new VP of Worldwide Business Development and a new Chief Marketing Officer.

The superbly-named Geneva Lake is new VP of WBD. Not only does she have a really cool name, but she also brings with her a wealth of ‘big vendor’ expertise, having previously served as head of Oracle’s Big Data and Analytics alliances organization. Lake is joined by David Cross, MapR’s new CMO, who previously helped spearhead the branding efforts at Coca-Cola, and before that, Ventiv Technology Inc.

The two hires come just a few weeks after MapR snapped up another former Oracle talent, Matt Mills, to be its new president and COO.

Lake will be tasked with building a “world-class channels and alliances network across the globe,” for MapR, while Cross will help to develop MapR’s global branding strategy.

Cross’s role was previously filled by Jack Norris, who’s been promoted from marketing chief to become the company’s Senior VP for Data and Applications. His new role will be to help promote the benefits of combining Hadoop and Spark to MapR’s customers, a new initiative the company calls “data convergence”.

Norris will work together with the tech analyst community to promote MapR’s offerings, the company said.

IPO looming?

What with so many changes on the management front, people would be forgiven for wondering if the company has been experiencing problems of late. However, MapR president Matt Mills insisted that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Just the opposite,” Mills told CMS Wire. “We’ve just had our best quarter ever. We’re well capitalized and on a path to growth.”

And that growth will likely involve a much-delayed IPO at some stage in the company’s future, though Mills was less than forthcoming on when exactly that might happen.

“As soon as the market conditions are right,” he said.

For now, MapR seems happy to play a waiting game. Mills told CMS Wire that many Fortune 1000 firms are still testing Hadoop and not yet ready to begin production deployments. Still, he sounded confident that most will eventually do so, and when they do, they’ll be asking MapR for its help.

“The more experience Enterprises have with Hadoop, the more likely they’ll choose MapR,” Mills predicted. “We have the best data platform.”

Main image: Jack Norris, Senior VP for Data and Applications at MapR Technologies, Inc.