William Sullivan on Cloudera Public Sector Arm’s Staff Growth & Agencies’ Data Management Priorities

William Sullivan, a nearly two-decade GovCon industry veteran, joined global software services provider #Cloudera March 2016 as vice president and general manager for public sector operations in North America to help drive the company’s open source offerings for agencies. Cloudera centers its open source services for government around the Apache Hadoop software framework to help agencies manage and apply large volumes of data in their operations. Sullivan recently caught up with ExecutiveBiz for this in-depth conversation on Cloudera’s work to increase its staff count in the Washington, D.C. region in line with the company’s larger public sector market expansion efforts and overviews his short- and long-term goals for the government business. ExecutiveBiz: What areas have you focused on at Cloudera since you joined? Bill Sullivan: We’ve grown the number of staff here in the DC area significantly. This growth was necessary both to meet the needs of current customers and to capture the identified demand moving forward. I’ve also focused on building the core disciplines, including marketing, partners, sales and consulting within public sector. Scaling this fast is challenging. Cloudera attracts high quality people, but onboarding them quickly to a new, complex technology can be difficult. A component to our success has been physically moving to new offices in McLean, Virginia, establishing a corporate culture that is our own, but also in line with the company as a whole. The culture here at Cloudera is much like what we enjoyed when I was formerly at PeopleSoft, and I hope we will be similarly successful. The difference is that we are a committed open source company, and an early evangelist of the open source movement, so that philosophy of intelligent collaboration shines through in all areas of the business locally. Being an open source company offers new operational challenges every day. The rapid advance of open source technology forges a different relationship with our customers, partners and market.

http://blog.executivebiz.com/2017/02/william-sullivan-on-cloudera-public-sector-arms-staff-growth-agencies-data-management-priorities/