[Ed. Note: Cloudera is a two-year-old startup founded by individuals from Facebook, Yahoo!, Google and Oracle to develop tools around Hadoop, a technology originally developed at Yahoo! And now owned by Apache to capture and stage large amounts of unstructured data for analytical research. Cloudera recently announced a partnership with the Data Analytics Division of EMC (formally GreenPlum) to integrate its latest Hadoop distribution with the GreenPlum massively parallel analytics engine. The following Q&A is from a short interview of Cloudera co-founder Amr Awadallah by SiliconAngle founder John Furrier available as a recording on SiliconAngle.tv] – mrh

John Furrier: Talk about Cloudera the company, your mission and vision.

Amr Awadallah: First I want to say it’s nice to have you with us in the office, sharing all the extra space we have. It is great to have such an interactive company sitting with us.

Cloudera’s mission is to allow companies to profit from all their data, where “all” is the operative word. All here means data that is in structured form in tables and data that comes from application servers, metro servers, transaction systems – it doesn’t matter. You can put any kind of data in our system and make money from it. So that is kind of the mission statement of the company.

What we are using to enable that at the heart is Hadoop, which is an Apache product. We built a number of tools around Hadoop, that make it easier to transfer data, store data, process data, and analyze data, again where data here is any data – it can be videos, images, Web use data, or structured relational data.

John Furrier: Data’s not going away. But you have a lot of space in here that you want to fill up with new hires, you are growing really fast. A lot of smart people are working here. Talk about your background and why all these smart people are coming together at Cloudera.

Amr Awadallah: Really it’s because of what you said at the beginning of your statement: Data’s not going away. All forms of data are growing by leaps and bounds. Structured data is not growing as quickly, but unstructured data, Web data, and data from all sorts of instrumentation and devices whether they be network sensors or smart devices, etc., etc., is just growing by leaps and bounds right now.

John Furrier: Storage is at the center of this convergence, right?

Amr Awadallah: Exactly. But what distinguishes Hadoop is it’s storage, just like the other guys, meaning it’s a clustered storage system that you can use commodity hardware and build very nice storage. But then on top of that it’s also a processing system. So the people who built Hadoop originally at Yahoo! deserve a lot of credit. They looked and said there’s all these new – we call the pizza boxes – these new servers, all this nice hardware we’re buying these days, they have lots of cores in them. So it’s kind of wrong to buy them and just let the cores sit idle and just use the hard drives for the data. I want to use both my hard disks and my cores to do work.

John Furrier: That’s this big clustering trend everyone’s talking about.

Amr Awadallah: Yes, but that’s the hardware that Hadoop uses.

John Furrier: Let’s talk about you for a second. When we first met you were at Stanford getting your PhD. You started a company, then sold it and then joined Yahoo!. But Yahoo! and Google and Facebook – these are big Clouds. Now all the enterprises are going there, all the financial services, healthcare, you name it, are all going there. So talk about what’s happening from those early trend setters, the Yahoo!s, and translating into the market in terms of what other people are working on. They’re learning, on their dime, how do you see that?

Amr Awadallah: In one way you could say that being at Yahoo!, and one of my co-founders’ from Facebook, and one of my other co-founders was from Google, we saw the future of other companies just because at these companies data was growing much quicker that at other companies. So we come from the future. And we’re coming here from the future and telling you if you don’t have a solution like this you’re going to die in a few years, because the amount of data that’s going to come at you is going to bury you.

So that is the message we’re delivering. However, we want to emphasize that this is not just about size. Size is important, and big data movements are definitely a part of it. However, this is about agility as well. Speed and agility, but by agility I mean the ability to handle data of any type, and the ability to absorb data that’s changing all the time. You don’t have a fixed table that you are always working with; it’s changing all the time. So it is actually that message that is resonating stronger with our customers right now that I have a system that you can throw any data at and it just works, as opposed to I have to first normalize my data and put it into nice tables and so on.

John Furrier: What’s your vision of the future for the average person out there in society? Mobility is certainly important, low latency data to the edge. Is data just invisible, a utility for users?

Amr Awadallah: Obviously what we are building here is not for the average person. It’s not software for you to run on your iPhone. We’re selling software to run within large enterprises. However the effect of that is that services being delivered to you as an end consumer will be much more customized and tailored.