By Cheechee Lin
Kirk Dunn (UCLA ’83), chief operating officer of Cloudera, presented the Easton Technology Leadership Program’s annual keynote on Monday, May 18. Dunn backs his discussion of “Big Data Analytics: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow” with nearly 20 years of experience in technology engineering, marketing, sales and management.
Prior to Cloudera, in addition to serving in senior roles for a range of companies, Dunn served as CEO for PowerFile, which was successfully sold to Hitachi LG Data Storage, and Bang Networks Inc. Dunn’s impressive record in the data analysis sphere began early, when he graduated from UCLA with a degree in mathematics and applied sciences. Cloudera, which was founded by three engineers from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and a former Oracle executive, is at the very forefront of growth in the big data analytics space, with a valuation of over $4 billion. Intel invested $740 million in Cloudera last April, receiving an 18 percent stake in the company. The growth in data is astonishing, Dunn said: “Data doubling is now faster than Moore’s law.”
In addition to discussing industry trends, Dunn gave students advice on innovation and building businesses. “There are three ways to build a business: You can either do an old thing an old way, like reinventing the mainframe computer, or do a new thing a new way, such as Facebook with bonding people together through visualizing the social graphs of relationships. I believe the best way is to find a new solution to an existing problem — and this would be the whole market of big data.”
Read Easton’s blog for a full review of Kirk Dunn's talk
Dunn's talk resonates following news of UCLA Anderson’s new Morrison Family Center for Marketing Studies and Data Analytics, made possible by a multi-million-dollar gift from Professors Don and Sherie Morrison. The Morrison Family Center will serve as a global resource for academics and practitioners as they use data and analytical tools to advance understanding of consumer markets and behaviors.
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