14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo continues to lose key people, with Doug Cutting, one of the company's best search engineers and the creator of Hadoop, the increasingly popular open-source grid computing framework, deciding to leave it and join cloud tech startup Cloudera. At the new company he will continue to work mainly on Hadoop while also focusing on other related projects.
“Going forward, Cloudera presents an opportunity to work with a wider range of Hadoop users. I hope to help synthesize these many voices into a project that best serves all,” Cutting wrote on his personal blog. “Hadoop has grown to be a large, active, project very quickly, but it is still a young project. At Cloudera I will be well positioned to help it mature.”
With Yahoo announcing its new partnership with Microsoft last week it is effectively abandoning all efforts in the search sector. The move may mean the loss of several hundred jobs in the search department, with 400 employees moving to Microsoft at some point. Still, Cutting argues that the recent announcement had nothing to do with his decision and the timing was purely coincidental.
“This has been in the works for awhile and is unrelated,” Cutting told the New York Times. “I am definitely not leaving in any sort of protest, and the thing I like least about this move is that it might be perceived that way.”
Yahoo, as expected, supported the move, at least publicly, ensuring that development on Hadoop would continue even if it was losing a key engineer in the project and even if shutting down its internal search operations also meant shutting down the biggest Yahoo project to use the platform. Cutting added that his everyday tasks wouldn't change that much and that he would continue to collaborate with the Yahoo team on the open-source project.
Cloudera, a Silicon Valley startup, aims to take Hadoop to enterprise customers in other fields that deal with large data sets besides web services, and the company sells consulting and support services to financial institutions and other big enterprises looking to use the platform.