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Cloudera, the commercial Apache Hadoop company, today announced that software industry veteran Scott Dietzen is joining its Board of Directors.

A former senior executive at Yahoo!, Zimbra and BEA Systems, Dietzen brings a wealth of experience and leadership to Cloudera.

Dietzen has extensive leadership experience, having helped build, sell, and transition three major Internet technology companies.

Most recently, he was SVP, Applications at Yahoo!, where his responsibilities included Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra. He came to Yahoo! via the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he served as President and CTO. Before that Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems — acquired by Oracle in 2008 — which he came to with the acquisition of Java and web application server pioneer WebLogic.

Dietzen holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon.

Looks like Patrick Hunt has hopped jobs.

From his Twitter account:

Great first day @cloudera meeting the team, getting up to speed, much paperwork, and catching up on some ZooKeeper backlog.

Virtual Instruments, a provider of storage area network and virtual infrastructure optimization solutions, today announced that John W. Thompson, Symantec Board Chairman and former CEO, has taken on the role of CEO of the company.

Thompson joined Virtual Instruments as an investor and board member in 2009.

John W. Thompson is replacing Mark Urdahl.  Urdahl remains a director and a large shareholder of the company.

During Thompson’s 10-year tenure as CEO of Symantec, he grew revenues from $600 million to over $6 billion.  He transformed the company into a leader in security, storage and systems management solutions, delivering world class products to a global customer base, including both individuals and large-scale enterprises.

Beyond his role at Symantec, Thompson served on the National Infrastructure Advisory Committee (NIAC), making recommendations regarding the security of critical US infrastructure, a role to which President George W. Bush appointed him.  Before joining Symantec, Thompson spent over 25 years at IBM in various senior sales and marketing management positions, most recently as general manager of IBM Americas.   He holds a bachelor’s degree from Florida A&M University and a master’s degree in management science from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

AppSense, provider of user virtualization solutions for the enterprise, has announced that Darron Antill has joined the company as chief operating officer.

Antill brings more than 20 years of technology sales and management experience to AppSense and will be responsible for developing the expanding network of AppSense global operations, as well as growing the company’s North American business. This appointment follows on from the recent relocation of key company executives to the US.

Prior to AppSense, Antill was CEO of specialist virtualization integrator Vistorm, where he led the company to record revenues and oversaw the business through its acquisition by EDS and subsequent transition to HP. During his seven years at Vistorm, Antill was responsible for its sales and services business, building strategic vendor relationships and developing strong channel alliances.

Antill joins an expanding AppSense executive team in the US including Peter Rawlinson, vice president of marketing in AppSense’s US headquarters in New York City and Martin Ingram, vice president of strategy, and Simon Rust, vice president of technology, in its technology center in Palo Alto, California.

In 2009, AppSense sold 170,000 licenses of its user virtualization software, representing close to 20 percent of all virtual desktops sold globally, and over 60 percent of all componentized virtual desktop seats sold.  AppSense products are used in a wide-range of industries and 2009 growth showed specific traction in financial services, healthcare, higher education and the public sector.

Cloudera, the commercial Apache Hadoop company, today named John Kreisa as Vice President of Marketing.

With nearly two decades of enterprise software product marketing and product management experience, Kreisa will play a key leadership role in developing and executing Cloudera’s global growth strategy.

Prior to Cloudera, Kreisa held various senior marketing roles in innovative and category-leading technology companies, including three years at Mark Logic Inc., an information infrastructure software provider, and Business Objects. Most recently at Mark Logic, John was Director of Industry Solutions and Director of Product Marketing, where he contributed to a wide range of marketing initiatives and focused on enabling industry-focused sales teams with applied messaging, sales tools, competitive analysis and positioning.

Widely quoted, John was also the primary company spokesperson for press and analysts, spoke at dozens of industry events, and was a key contributor to demand generation activity and company events. Before Mark Logic, he spent six years in product marketing at Business Objects, which was a pioneer in the Business Intelligence (BI) market and helped to establish the category.