Hadoop vendor Cloudera Inc. has made an interesting hire in the shape of Daniel Sturman, an 8-year Google exec who was most recently a VP of Engineering at the Internet giant.

Sturman joined Cloudera as its new VP of Engineering on Monday, and according to a press release will “lead all development within the company, with the Apache Software community and with Cloudera’s 1,600+ global partners.”

Cloudera is one of the hottest players on the Big Data market right now, and is making big efforts to spur adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise. The company is still privately owned, but has so far raised more than $1.2 billion, and is rumored to be valued at close to $5 billion.

Sturman, who was responsible for overseeing the infrastructure that underlies Google’s massive cloud platform, will likely be instrumental in making Hadoop easier for enterprises to deploy. He’ll also be tasked with making the platform easier to use, so enterprises can better extract valuable insights from their data, said Casey Green, executive vice president of business development at Avalon Consulting LLC, in an interview with CRN.com.

Green says that Cloudera has pulled off a significant coup in landing Sturman, who was central to making Google’s cloud software more accessible.

“While at Google, Sturman led efforts to lower the entry level to cloud computing with Google Cloud and Google App Engine,” Green told CRN. “By adding Sturman to its team, Cloudera is making a savvy move to position themselves further to innovate in making Hadoop easier.”

As Cloudera’s VP of Engineering, Sturman will be tasked with heading the firm’s development efforts and helping to improve the Hadoop platform, which was partly inspired by work perfomed at Google.

Green told CRN that it’s becoming vital for firms like Cloudera to ease Hadoop deployment, both on-premise and in the cloud. That aligns with recent comments from Wikibon analyst George Gilbert, who told me that the advent of cloud-based Hadoop services will address the skills shortage and lower the barrier to adoption.

Sturman is uniquely qualified to make that happen, having played a key role in Google’s transformation into a provider of cloud computing services. Before that, he was in charge of database development at IBM.

“The original design concepts for Apache Hadoop and many of the ensuing innovative analytic projects originate from Google,” noted Cloudera CE Tom Reilly. “We are excited to have a Google technology leader who understands modern architectures and the art of turning data into insight take our platform to the next level.”

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