Cloudera!

When Christophe Bisciglia worked at Google, the 28-year-old computer scientist quickly became the company's top evangelist for cloud computing, teaching academia and industry how to churn through mountains of data to discover new insights by shifting heavy digital workloads from islands of PCs and data centers to the globally interconnected Web. As a founder of startup Cloudera, he's aiming to capitalize on those lessons.

Bisciglia's eight-month-old Cloudera teaches companies how to "compete at Google scale." Cloudera sells technical support for open-source software called Hadoop, which analyzes huge amounts of data much faster than traditional computers by distributing the work across hundreds of machines. For companies in fields that routinely require heavy number-crunching like biotech, online advertising, and finance, Cloudera's service could help find opportunities that might not be apparent using traditional computing methods.

With a management team made up of Google and Facebook veterans and $11 million from venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, and high-profile angel investors including VMware (VMW) co-founder Diane Greene and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, Cloudera is emerging as a player in the nascent field of cloud computing and a resource that companies dealing with quantities of data should be aware of.