 Okay, we're back. We're live in San Francisco. We have two events going on, one in Vegas, EOC World and one here in San Francisco. This is theCUBE, SiliconAngle.tv's exclusive coverage of the Hadoop ecosystem. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconAngle.com and I'm joined here with the new VP of marketing, Peter Ellis Cooper. Cooper Ellis. Cooper Ellis. Cooper Ellis, congratulations on your new role. You're taking over the VP, as VP of engineering from Amar Awadala who will maintain the CTO position. You guys announced that news today. Yep, I went out this morning. So, Cloudera now has grown to have hundreds and hundreds of employees. There's no official statement on the number but through my extensive research, I'm pegging the number at 250 plus. Give or take 10. 260 maybe? That's pretty close. Very close, I'm almost there. I've been involved in Cloudera since they were founded. They got to know the founders early on as of the office. So, Washington Cloudera grow up. It's been a great experience for me and got to know a lot of good friends there. And so, Amar Awadala as the founder managing engineering. You know, I noticed he was kind of stressed out last time I was in the office. When he was working late and he was the founder. You know, that's a lot of engineering going on. A lot of, you know, close to 70 plus engineers I hear. And his busy schedule. He was the first guy I met when I went in there. We talked for hours. Amar's a fantastic founder, great technical founder, great individual, great integrity, big fan of Amar. But let's talk about Cloudera's engineering environment. Obviously, you really can't add much. You're only two days on the job. But you know, you've had to go through the interview process. You've embedded. I'm sure you talked to the board members. I'm sure you talked to all the personnel there. And it's a tough hire at Cloudera. I know people in the past and other positions. They've had great candidates and sometimes it's not a good fit. So, talk about what's happening at Cloudera. I got you so excited to leave your job at VMware to come here. Yeah. You know, it's a great opportunity, obviously. And I've been working in the middleware space, which is kind of adjacent space for years and got really interested in the interaction of data and apps. And I started looking at how they were scaling across commodity hardware to build out these Hadoop clusters and started looking at, wow, there's a lot of data out there. And, you know, the opportunity to help customers be successful with that is really what started me on this whole thing. And then when I got in and I met Armour and I started meeting the guys in the team, I was like, these guys are building a team that's built the last. And that's what really got me excited. I did the first video. It was kind of a recruiting video in our first CUBE studio. Had these hanging balls from Ikea at the back of the Cloud Air office. And it was Chad, who's now at Wibby Data, Charles and Armour and Eli. And they're talking about how great it was of the culture. And that video is still on their website, I believe. And they've continued to build that DNA in the culture of Cloud Air, high-quality individuals. And they've attracted some real high-end scientists and computer scientists. So they've done a good job. Okay, let's talk about what you've done. Okay, so you work at Spring Source, a very famous acquisition by VMware. When Paul Moritz came over to VMware, VMware was basically a almost like an Oracle model, you know, license focused on the enterprise. Back when virtualization, that's all they could do is charge for licenses. And that wasn't going over well. As virtualization started growing, customers are unhappy paying for licenses for VMware. Paul Moritz comes in, lays out a stack and says, hey, we need to bring something in here. That was Spring Source. So that was an open source project. What about your role in open spring source? Yeah, so I ran engineering at Spring Source and the acquisition by VMware was really a big game changer for VMware, right? Because it was the first time they really did a big acquisition and stepped out of the infrastructure space and the apps. So, you know, on both sides of that, it was a lot of things to get right during that, you know, that transition. But going back, you know, Spring was really built around open source projects and, you know, working in the community and then assembling a platform out of open source components to basically meet enterprise customer needs. So, some of the same, you know, challenges applied there. What did you learn at Spring Source? Because really, Spring Source was, I mean, open source has grown, I'm calling it third generation open source because you've got more than enough to call it third generation. But, you know, post, Unix, Linux, whatever you want to call a version of that, you know, stuff coming out of BSD, you know, history and Unix. It was successful. You guys are attracted to a lot of talent at Spring Source. You do a lot of value. At the same time, you balance the contributions to open source. What did you learn in that experience? How to balance a commercial operation and be an actor and a participant in a community? Right, that's the trick, right? I mean, all, same thing at Spring Source as we've got here at Cloudera, which is, you know, it's all about the open source community that you're building off of and the contributions to that community, participating in the community. You've got to do that and be a good citizen. And if you're successful in doing that, you know, you can move the innovation forward in those projects and contribute to do that. But the trick is you've got to balance that with paying the rent and keeping the lights on, right? So there's a lot of customers that need to be taken care of and, you know, making those trade-offs between, you know, what does this customer need versus what's the right thing to do for the open source, you know, can be challenging. And, you know, that's the kind of stuff that I'm really interested in. Where have you seen companies, and you know the name names, but where people have failed being successful in open source? What have you noticed? Have you looked at the carnage and some of the wreckage? What you see is, you know, if you see companies that sort of, they'll make a contribution to open source but it's not a real commitment, right? And, or they might put something out there that they're not really committed to. And, you know, they'll start a project and then put it out in open source as an afterthought. You know, the right way to do it is to really be involved, have the project in the open from the start, let the community be involved, you contribute. And it's a partnership, right? And so, you know, there's a real difference between building something in the open source and just kind of putting something out there. I'll start with Eli Collins, who's one of the early engineers at Cloudera. He's also ex-BMWare. And we'll come back to your BMWare experience because it's a kind of interesting story. You've got open source with spring source and you go with the commercial entity, BMWare, which is owned by EMC. So I wanted to talk about that but let's talk about what Eli and I were talking earlier in the hallway. I said, you know, Eli, what are you working on now? And after we were talking about all these changes and this is a lot of, a lot of code, the volume of shipping is high. What's out there? Yeah, I mean, they're constantly shipping updates and changes. What did you think of that? I mean, were you blown away by that? Yeah, partly. It's partly because there's a very active open source community, Apache community around, you know, the Hadoop projects. So you can do a lot more, right? And there's a, you know, there's a lot of activity and there's a lot of pieces that need to be assembled. And part of the value that Cloudera brings, right, is you've got to assemble those components, test them and make sure that they're gonna, you know, meet the enterprise software bar. And part of what, you know, I think Eli was talking about there is that, you know, when you have a lot of customers, as Cloudera does today, you've got a lot of different people with different needs and, you know, in not all cases, the open source doesn't necessarily meet their needs. So you have to tweak it or do something special. And then the trick is, that's gotta go back into the open source and be integrated. So when you rolled into VMware from spring source, obviously different culture, VMware is, you know, very commercial focused, great technical people as well. What did you do there? Any, was it different? What process did you work on there? I mean, at VMware, it was, you know, we were also managing the open source project spring, but also we had some commercial software that we brought in through acquisitions in the later stages of spring source. So again, it was a balance between the open source and working in the open source community. Did you have a chance to have some successes in that new engineering environment? Yeah, absolutely. You can share with the folks, some of the projects. I mean, you know, we brought some, you know, the spring framework projects, you know, a huge community, you know, millions of users around spring. And we were able to introduce some runtime components into that platform and take those to market as part of a suite, which we introduced at VMware. And the idea, you know, with VMware was to bring that community of developers onto the VMware platform and then use the VMware channel to introduce that platform to a broader market. And, you know, it was very successful. Okay, so, you know, my final question is, we got our next guest lining up, I can see him all queuing up, like airplanes at the airport on a rainy day. Why did Cloudera want you? What was the reason for the new VP hiring? Was it the fact that there's just so much work to do that it's now, you know, I'm not saying Armored didn't work full-time, but I mean, I know he's doing a lot of evangelist work and business is growing like crazy. What was the core thing? Was it like, okay, Peter, we need you to run ops? Is it more just, you know, keeping the truth, strange run on time? Was it more different perspective from, because in fact, you have the open source thing, all of the above? You know, I think the part that really goes back to is, you know, Mike's got this vision and Armored's got the same vision of building a team that's really built to last, right? And they wanted somebody who had built teams successfully before that could help that team make those trade-offs and grow and, you know, build a team that could really carry a large engineering initiative and a large customer base forward. It's a large operation. Now, you're talking about schedules, you're balancing the open source, and they got to actually ship some code, commercial code. They got the core Cloudera products. Yeah, and it's an exceptional team. I mean, I spent a lot of time interviewing with these guys, and they're a great team. I'm sure they're going to get higher too, more numbers, and you've got a full organization, you've got an organizational behavior strategy. You've got to have, you know, succession of strategy. You've got to preserve that culture, right? These guys have set an amazing culture. Set objectives? You've got to, you know, maintain that culture and allow the team to scale up without losing the good stuff that you have when you're in the startup. What have you learned as an engineering manager executive? It's the best practice in your mind. What's your philosophy on how to manage a team? Because, you know, you've got a lot of young guys coming in, you have a lot of young experience, and a lot of, I mean, younger guys coming in, you have experienced guys in there. You got to set, you know, reviews, you got to keep people on schedule. Yeah. What's your philosophy in hurting the cats, as some say, you know? And these guys are wildcarts to the open-source guys. You know how, you know who they are out there. They're good citizens at the same time. You know, they've got causes there. They really, truly, it's passionate. So the thing about- How do you hurt those cats? So people who are passionate respond to the same, you know, my experience is people who are passionate respond to, you know, the same things that, you know, I respond to, which is, you know, be who you, you know, do what you say you're going to do and follow through and, you know, be yourself and provide leadership by, you know, example. I've built these products before, you know, been around these kind of teams and a lot of it is just, you know, staying focused, staying with the program, recognizing people for their contribution, allowing people to grow, you know, give them exposure to different opportunities. It sounds so simple. Really does. You know, at the end of the day, a lot of it comes back to the simple stuff, you know? Okay, Peter Cooper Ellis, the new VP of Engineering at Cloudera. Welcome inside theCUBE for the first time. Thank you. Great to have you. Good luck with everything. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.