Mike Olson

Mike Olson is a database industry veteran best known as a co-founder of Cloudera, the company that did more than any other to commercialise Apache Hadoop and bring "big data" infrastructure into mainstream enterprise use. Before Cloudera, Olson built a career in database technology, notably as chief executive of Sleepycat Software, maker of the open-source embedded database Berkeley DB, which was used inside countless commercial and open-source products before its acquisition by Oracle in 2006.

After a period leading Oracle's embedded technologies business following the Sleepycat acquisition, Olson co-founded Cloudera in 2008 alongside engineers from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, including Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah and Jeff Hammerbacher. Olson served as Cloudera's founding chief executive, steering the company through its early years as it built a commercial distribution and support business around the open-source Hadoop ecosystem.

In 2013, Olson transitioned from CEO to the roles of Chairman of the Board and Chief Strategy Officer as Tom Reilly took over day-to-day leadership, a move that allowed him to focus on Cloudera's long-term technical and market strategy while the company scaled toward its 2017 initial public offering. He remained a public face of the big-data movement throughout this period, frequently speaking and writing about the shift from monolithic data warehouses to distributed, open-source data platforms.

Olson departed Cloudera in 2019 as the company underwent a significant leadership transition. Since then he has remained active as a technology investor, advisor and board member across data and open-source-adjacent organisations, including serving on advisory boards connected to university data science initiatives, drawing on his decades of experience bridging open-source communities and enterprise commercialisation.

Olson's lasting contribution lies in proving that open-source, distributed data infrastructure could be built into large, durable businesses. Cloudera's rise alongside rivals such as Hortonworks and MapR helped legitimise Hadoop-based architectures for enterprise customers, laying groundwork for the broader shift to distributed and, later, cloud-native data platforms that defines the industry today.