Data Sheet—Monday, October 27, 2014

Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Google CEO Larry Page is handing off product direction for search, commerce and maps (among other things) to a well-regarded lieutenant. Salesforce wants a $1 billion annual business in healthcare IT services. Plus, Cloudera is building enterprise credibility via relationships with Microsoft and Teradata. Read on to get your workweek started.

Google reorg appoints new products chief. Sundar Pichai—whose name was floated as a candidate during the Microsoft CEO last year—now runs basic research plus development for search, commerce, maps and ad services. He was already in charge of Google Apps, the Android operating system, and the Chrome browser. Six executives who previously reported to CEO Larry Page are now under Pichai's sphere of influence. Re/code

HP seeks buyer for Chinese networking technology. Hewlett-Packard is looking to sell at least 51% of its ownership in H3C Technologies, which is a big supplier of network switches, routers and software in China. HP inherited the operation when it bought 3Com in 2010 for $2.7 billion. It may want the cash for other enterprise acquisitions. Wall Street Journal

CLOUD CHATTER

Salesforce's aggressive prescription for health care. One focus for the company's ambitious new business analytics service is hospitals, insurance companies and medical professionals. The former CIO of biotech giant Genentech is behind the push, which could eventually drive $1 billion in annual revenue (one-fifth of current sales). To get there, Salesforce needs a better bedside manner than either IBM and Microsoft, which have both spent years developing relationships in the market. Reuters

STATS & SPECS

Drug store chains turn off Apple Pay. Both CVS and Rite Aid have quietly quit supporting transactions using the Apple mobile payment service. Apparently, the move is motivated by plans for a competitive "wallet" being developed by Merchant Customer Exchange, a company backed by Walmart, Best Buy and Target. That technology, called CurrentC, is due next year. Fortune

FAQ

Cloudera's quest for enterprise credibility

In early October, more than 5,000 people showed up in New York for a specialized data science conference "presented" by enterprise data management pioneer Cloudera and publishing company O'Reilly Media.

That's 10 times the attendee count just a few years ago, when the big data and analytics gathering appealed mainly to IT professionals.

Those roaming the halls this year were just as likely to encounter fraud experts, customer service managers, risk management teams, and data scientists as software engineers, says Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly. One large credit-card issuer sent more than 70 people; only seven were officially with the company's technology team.

"Enterprises are really trying to figure out how to get their arms around their data," Reilly says. "This is not just about advanced analytics, this is about being agile with strategic business decisions."

That's why almost three-quarters of large enterprises are installing open source Apache Hadoop technology to orchestrate analytics reports gleaned from data distributed across multiple locations, according to Reilly. "What we say to people is that you can land all of your data, whether it's coming out of the cloud or from your customer databases, into a hub, retaining its original format, its full fidelity. From there you can analyze, search it, and perform predictive analytics."

With more than $1.2 billion backing it and Intel at its side, Cloudera claims the most widely adopted Hadoop technology in the world—although Hortonworks (which got $50 million from Hewlett-Packard over the summer) and MapR Technologies would probably argue the point. Some of Cloudera's named customers include Advanced Micro Devices, eBay, the U.S. Army, and Western Union.

Cloudera disclosed an important milestone last week: its technology now meets strict Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards. That is crucial for financial services customers such as MasterCard, and it opens the door to broader applications in the retail sector.

What's more, Cloudera has inked several high-profile partnerships (also revealed this month) that boost its enterprise credibility substantially. Two of the most notable: a sales alliance with data warehouse giant Teradata, and a development agreement with Microsoft that will bring Cloudera's software to Windows and to the Azure cloud service. (It also has new deals with EMC and Red Hat.)

"Cloudera has built its partner strategy out very well over the last year, and this is a key win, challenging the exclusivity Hortonworks seemed to have achieved in the nascent Hadoop-on-Windows world—one that is untapped so far but will become very large," says Gartner analyst Merv Adrian, addressing Cloudera's pacts with Microsoft. "Similarly, Cloudera's relationship with Teradata taps a market that represents the highest value slice of the enterprise data warehouse space."

With literally dozens of startups clamoring for the chance to reinvent enterprise data management, Cloudera must deliver quickly and systematically. "The pace is unrelenting, and challengers are on every side," Adrian says.

Will Cloudera prevail? Send feedback to datasheet@heatherclancy.com.

ONE MORE THING

Want a big raise next year? Bone up on hacker-thwarting security skills. Between now and 2022, the number of jobs focused on these tasks will grow 37%, with average base pay of $115,415, according to a new survey by staffing firm Modis. Another area with strong potential is health IT, where "clinical systems architects" can earn an average of $141,371 annual. Computerworld