Cloudera, a Silicon Valley startup, was founded by UW CSE bachelors alumnus and ex-Googler Christophe Bisciglia. (See a wonderful December 2007 Business Week cover story on Christophe here.) UW CSE on-leave graduate student Aaron Kimball was the first employee. In many ways, it’s an outgrowth of Google’s academic Hadoop initiative that Christophe launched at UW, currently reflected in courses such as CSE490H. Hadoop was co-created by Doug Cutting and graduating UW CSE Ph.D. student Mike Cafarella. (Neither Aaron nor Mike are mentioned in the article.)
(For those of you who can’t decipher the name, it’s “Cloud Era.” The color logo makes it clear.)
Read the full New York Times article here. There’s additional detail in an article in The Register here, and in an earlier New York Times blog post here.