New Cloudera Alliances Leader Ready To Scale Cloud And Channel Partnerships

Gary Green played a major role in building out the VMware ecosystem. He’s bringing that experience to a company that looks to emerge as a leader in the red-hot data warehousing and analytics market.

Gary Green, who played a pivotal role building the VMware channel, has taken charge of Cloudera’s efforts to scale alliances with the industry’s leading cloud providers as the company looks to emerge as a powerhouse in the enterprise data cloud market.

At Cloudera now for three months as vice president of strategic partnerships, Green aims to expand a broad set of alliances with cloud providers, both public and private, and in doing so deliver channel partners new engagement opportunities.

“My arrival to Cloudera signals the commitment from the executive team and the company to really reinforce to the marketplace, customers and the partner community in general how important partnerships of all types are,” Green told CRN.

[Related: Cloudera, Largely Controlled By Carl Icahn, Reportedly Considers Sale]

Before his arrival, Cloudera’s channel leadership had “done a nice job” creating the Cloudera Connect Program last November. Both Hortonworks and Cloudera, before they merged at the start of last year to form the company in its current incarnation, valued and emphasized channel engagement.

“We’ve always had a strong traditional channel program and partnerships with two-tier distribution,” Green said. And the Cloudera Connect program “up-leveled it” with new opportunities for enablement, certifications and market development funds.

“But a lot of work still has to happen to bring real value to our VARs down at the localized level,” he said.

That work starts with forging even closer relationships with cloud technology giants—something Green hopes his years of experience at VMware will facilitate.

“Our relationship with the global cloud providers is something that’s new to Cloudera, and I’m managing those partnerships,” he told CRN.

Last month, Cloudera expanded its alliance with Google Cloud Platform, complementing already strong relationships with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Those hyperscale partners are critical as Cloudera encourages its channel to shift Cloudera Data Platform customers out of on-premises data centers and into the cloud.

Cloudera has also worked closely with Red Hat to package its technology in OpenShift, enabling Kubernetes-orchestrated deployments on private clouds that give customers greater agility and ease of use, as well as the ability to separate compute and storage resources.

Cloudera also has a long-standing relationship with IBM, which has been a “fruitful, intrinsic value-based partnership,” as well as alliances with Teradata, Oracle and a growing ISV ecosystem.

On the channel side, Cloudera has also focused its partner program on systems integrators of late, from global giants like Accenture and Deloitte to smaller boutique firms.

“Channel partners are critical to our long-term success,” Green said. “The time, focus and money resources we put to them is pretty significant.”

Green looks to leverage his industry experience to advance all those relationships.

As employee 103 at VMware, hired directly by founder Diane Greene in the company’s early days, he played an important role building out the virtualization giant’s strategic ecosystem.

Green developed relationships with systems integrators, ISVs and OEM vendors, and after VMware’s acquisition of Nicira, ran go-to-market operations for the networking and security business, and later the cloud-native business.

After leaving VMware in 2016, he took charge of global go-to-market operations for DevOps pioneer Puppet, and then briefly did the same for Packet before that company was acquired by Equinix.

For Cloudera’s channel, Green sees a vast opportunity to migrate customers on the data platform into modern cloud environments, and then add services beyond the license sale.

“Traditionally they’ve been working with us for legacy solutions on-prem,” he said. “Now we give them the opportunity to participate in a hybrid cloud solution.”