Fresh of a big week of forward-thinking developments and a strategic partnership with Microsoft at Strata, Hortonworks just announced that it has appointed Bob Page as its new vice president of products. The release can be found here.

Page has 17 years of experience in the analytics business. He founded a web analytics firm in 1996, led it through an IPO, and went on to serve as Yahoo’s senior director of strategic data solutions. He later joined eBay as vice president of analytics platform and delivery.

Page’s latest gig puts him in charge of the Hortonworks Data Platform, the company’s flagship Hadoop distribution. He will be responsible for tailoring future versions of HDP to market demand.

“I am thrilled to be joining Hortonworks and helping to make the community-driven, 100-percent open source Apache Hadoop distribution the most stable and enterprise-ready distribution possible,” said Bob Page, vice president of products of Hortonworks. “I am a strong believer in a community-driven and open Apache Hadoop, since the innovation within the open source community will always eclipse the innovation of a single group or company.”

Hortonworks is competing in a very tough market: it’s flanked by Cloudera and MapR on the software side, and by IBM, HP and Dell on the service end.  The company will no doubt be able to accomplish more by tapping into Page’s experience in this industry.

As Hadoop finds more and more paths to the enterprise, industry competition is heating up and many of the big players are hedging their bets by building the best management teams.  About a month ago 10gen, another rapidly growing big data firm, announced its own C-level change up. The company promoted president Max Schireson to CEO, a position that was previously held by current chairman Dwight Merrima.

10gen is the developer behind MongoDB, an open-source system that ranks as the most popular NoSQL database on the market. The company offers commercial support to enterprises that leverage its platform, as well as a hosted MongoDB monitoring service that’s available for free.