- Scott Gnau, president of data warehousing hardware/software vendor Teradata's (NYSE:TDC) R&D ops (Teradata Labs), is leaving to become the CTO of Hadoop software vendor Hortonworks (HDP). Global consulting/support services chief Dan Harrington will run Teradata Labs until a permanent successor is found.
- At Teradata, Gnau was responsible for "direction for all research, development and sales support activities related to Teradata integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and associated solutions," and oversaw 1,400 workers. At Hortonworks, he'll be responsible for the company's R&D programs and tech strategy.
- Teradata owned a 7% stake in Hortonworks at IPO time. Hadoop has been seen as a threat Teradata's traditional data warehousing offerings, one that it has tried to head off with the help of acquisitions.
- News of Gnau's hiring arrives shortly after Hortonworks unveiled a slew of new features for its Hadoop offerings that it argues address enterprise management and security needs. The features include automated provisioning/scaling of Hadoop clusters on cloud infrastructure (IaaS) platforms, automated rolling upgrades, simplified authentication, and automated security administration.
- The cloud provisioning/auto-scaling features are made possible by the acquisition of SequenceIO, a developer of open-source tools for launching Hadoop clusters on major IaaS platforms (Azure, AWS, OpenStack, etc.) and via Docker containers (lightweight virtual machines). SequenceIO's offerings will be integrated with Hortonworks' software platform, and be provided to the Apache Software Foundation (responsible for Hadoop, among other things).