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Amr Awadallah

How a “geek from Egypt” built a billion-dollar data company Cloudera

Amr Awadallah, an American computer scientist of Egyptian descent is a pioneer in the usage of Apache Hadoop for the analysis of data. He co-founded the company Cloudera. Today, Clouder has a valuation of over US$4.1 billion.  The company provides cutting-edge data management and advanced analytics using Apache Hadoop and the most current recent open-source technology. 

Amr Awadallah
Image Source: bizjournals.com

Early Life

Amr Awadallah worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners before joining Cloudera. Prior to that, he was VP of Engineering at Yahoo!, where he oversaw a team that employed Apache Hadoop for business intelligence and data analysis across all of Yahoo’s web businesses. Amr Awadallah has a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University as well as a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University in Egypt.

Success Story

Amr’s journey is in many ways the essence of Silicon Valley. The story of a determined immigrant, a fateful turn, and the significance of being able to innovate while addressing a genuine customer problem.

Amr didn’t consider starting his own business when he was younger. Large incumbents controlled Egypt’s economy, making it difficult for newcomers to flourish. Amr moved abroad to pursue his doctorate studies because, like his father, he hoped to become a university professor. But when Amr moved to Palo Alto to obtain his Ph.D. at Stanford University, he was surprised by how close the big technology firms he had grown up hearing about were to him.

The “pivot” or change in the situation occurred at Stanford. He discovered that starting a business was feasible and that his experience as an immigrant had benefited him as an entrepreneur. Being an immigrant, he felt at ease with taking chances. He was prepared to leave his native country and everyone he knew, just like other immigrants, in order to embark on a new journey.

Amr thinks that a large number of technology companies are founded by immigrants in part because of this. At Yahoo, Amr held the position of VP of Product Intelligence Engineering. Amr was charged with creating an intelligent search feature for Yahoo, probably in an effort to take on Google.

Amr encountered numerous issues with performance, pricing, size, and flexibility when working on sizable BI and analysis at Yahoo that were caused by platforms like IBM, Oracle, and, Microstrategy. He was asked to explore Hadoop by Doug Cutting, a Yahoo coworker and former chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.

Doug built the original Hadoop software in 2004. Amr started using Hadoop at work, and over the course of the following two years, he was able to reduce the information processing pipeline and complete tasks 10 times more affordably than previously. Amr was persuaded about the effectiveness and affordability of Hadoop.

The same issues Amr had with BI and analytics were being experienced by many other businesses. The remedy turned out to be Hadoop. Soon a brand-new tech business was ready to launch; the founders presented the initial idea to Accel Partners and received the initial funding. In 2008, Amr Awadallah, Christophe Bisciglia, Jeff Hammerbacher, and Mike Olson together established Cloudera, Inc.

About the Company

American software provider Cloudera, Inc. offers enterprise data management tools that heavily rely on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers the Cloudera Data Platform which is a set of cloud computing and data processing-related technologies. Several of these solutions are delivered through publicly accessible cloud servers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, whereas others are subscriber-only private cloud services. These products are marketed by Cloudera for use in data analysis and machine learning.

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