In their ongoing coverage of Oracle Open World 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with Mike Olson, Chairman of the board of Cloudera and Chief Strategy Officer in theCUBE. The three discuss changes in the industry that now make it easy for Cloudera to simply offer their solutions without having to explain the significance of big data and the cloud. As Joe Tucci mentioned in his keynote, we now live in the “Cloud era;” Given the company’s growth, expertise and strategy, Olson argues that it belongs to Cloudera.

Cloudera began working with Oracle about two years ago on the big data appliance. Olson suggests the partnership seemed natural given that both had made impressive gains in the market. As he puts, it “Our vision was, leaders should do business with leaders.” The partnership was mutually beneficial given that Oracle’s global reach and account integration lent credibility to Cloudera’s expertise. Olson notes that Cloudera has seen “real uptake in new deployments” as a result.

Olson notes that Oracle has received some criticism for having a closed as opposed to collaborative approach. Yet, he thinks this perception may be a bit exaggerated. Olson points to Oracle’s perspective on Open Source as an example, noting the company’s relationship with Linux as an example.

A key offering for Cloudera customers is integration. Olson explains, “None of our customers stands up a new Cloudera installation by itself. Our customers need to be sure that our products integrate well with their existing infrastructure.”

Furrier asks about the state of entrepreneurship in this modern era of cloud and big data. He suggests that what it takes to be an enterprise player and build a successful durable company has changed since the era of the Linux style revolutions. Olson believes the competitive edge is straightforward: don’t worry about the competition. More specifically, he says “In this hyper-competitive market it’s our job to stay focused on our strategy, which is to build the best product for our customers. Concentrating on delivering customer value and worrying about competitors second, third or fourth is a winning customer strategy.” He also adds that Cloudera has made a point of hiring and executing well.

When it comes to trends that will continue to take off, Olson calls high performance in-memory databases “a no-brainer.” Furrier agrees that handling persistent data will continue to prove relevant.

Olson argues that what matters most going forward is solving business and social problems. He believes Cloudera will make a huge impact, “If we can apply [data] to designing better drugs, better crops, attacking meaningful problems – I think we can.” Olson is confident in Cloudera’s continued momentum, noting: “We are fortunate to have found a market that is enormous and exploding.”

Watch the full-interview with Mike Olson on theCUBE at Oracle Open World 2013 below: