The Hortonworks team offers an exceptional blend of Apache Hadoop development experience and commercial open source operational expertise. The company is backed by both Yahoo!, the premier digital media company and Benchmark Capital, a preeminent venture capital firm that has backed other successful technology companies such as eBay, Red Hat, SpringSource and Twitter.
Rob Bearden - CEO
Rob is the former chief operating officer of both SpringSource and JBoss, two of the most commercially successful open source companies in history. Rob also served in senior roles at Oracle, where he directed a $1 billion sales organization, I2 and Manhattan Associates. He currently sits on the boards of Black Duck and EnterpriseDB, two successful and well-regarded vendors in the open source industry. Rob has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Jacksonville State University and currently holds the title of Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.
Eric Baldeschwieler – CTO
Prior to co-founding Hortonworks, Eric served as VP Hadoop Software Engineering for Yahoo!, where he led the evolution of Apache Hadoop from a 20 node prototype to a 42,000 node service that is behind every click at Yahoo!. Eric also served as a technology leader for Inktomi’s web service engine, which Yahoo! acquired in 2003. Prior to Inktomi, Eric developed software for video games, video post production systems and 3D modeling systems. Eric has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Follow Eric on Twitter: @jeric14.
Shaun Connolly – VP Corporate Strategy
Shaun has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, with a track record of building early stage and midsize software companies into successful market leaders. Shaun was previously VP of Product Strategy at VMware where he focused on defining VMware’s cloud application platform vision. Shaun has also held VP and Director level positions at SpringSource, Red Hat, JBoss, Princeton Softech, HP, Bluestone Software, and Primavera Systems. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University.
Mitch Ferguson - VP Business Development
Mitch has helped to establish and execute global business development and channel strategies with enterprise software companies from early-stage through IPO, including SpringSource, Arbor Software and Vitria Technology. Most recently Mitch started Business Development at SpringSource, which contributed to it being acquired by VMware. At VMware, Mitch led strategic partnership efforts for VMware’s vFabric cloud platform with companies like salesforce.com. Mitch holds an MBA from the University of Maryland, and a B.S. from the University of South Carolina.
Dan Bradford - VP Finance
Dan has more than fourteen years of finance experience in the technology industry. Most recently he served as VP of Finance and Operations for Appcelerator, an open source platform for mobile application development. He has also held senior financial roles for JBoss, an open source middleware provider (acquired by Red Hat), BellSouth Intelliventures (now YellowPages.com) and MindSpring Enterprises (later EarthLink). Dan holds an MBA, Finance emphasis from the University of Georgia and a B.A. in Communications, Advertising emphasis from the University of Alabama.
John Kreisa – VP Marketing
John has more than 20 years of extensive enterprise software, big data, open source and analytics experience. Prior to joining Hortonworks, John was responsible for all storage marketing activity at Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. Previously, John served as vice president of marketing at Gluster, a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage (acquired by Red Hat) and at Cloudera, a leading provider of Hadoop-based software and services, where he managed all corporate marketing activity including communications, social media, product marketing and community outreach. John also worked in a variety of marketing roles at MarkLogic, an XML database provider, as director of product marketing and director of industry solutions and at Business Objects (acquired by SAP). John has spoken at multiple conferences and industry symposia. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Texas, Austin.
Greg Pavlik – VP Engineering
Greg has more than 15 years of experience in the distributed systems, middleware, and real-time analytics markets and brings proven software engineering management expertise to lead Hortonworks’ product development organization. Prior to joining Hortonworks, Greg spent nearly 10 years at Oracle, most recently as vice president of product development for Oracle’s market leading SOA and integration portfolio where he was responsible for building and managing the development organizations responsible for Oracle’s SOA Suite, governance offerings and Application Integration Architecture (AIA) products. Greg also served on Oracle’s External Research Board, Oracle’s Architecture Review Board, and led technical direction for the company’s Web services strategy and fusion middleware transaction processing infrastructure. Previously, Greg was the principal architect for the Java middleware division at Hewlett Packard and worked on Java Application Server middleware at Bluestone Software. Greg holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and a B.S. also from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ari Zilka - CPO
Ari has more than 20 years of software development expertise and a deep understanding of open source, enterprise software, and the execution required to build successful products. Ari was previously founder and CTO at Terracotta. Previously, Ari was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. Before joining Accel, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company’s new engineering initiatives. Prior to Walmart.com, Ari worked as a consultant at Sapient and at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.