Todd Papaioannou, the VP and chief cloud architect at Yahoo who was responsible for the cloud and Hadoop teams working at the internet company, resigned to take on the role of entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures.  Papaioannou only joined Yahoo last year, and explained in a chat with GigaOM that the reason he left so early was the lack of competitiveness.

Here’s what he said:

“It [Yahoo] has competition, but it’s along the lines of what Google and Facebook are doing in terms of products. I worked with the cloud technology group doing IaaS, PaaS and other interesting things, but we were just serving the rest of the company.”

At Battery Ventures, Papaioannou will be in charge of  identify key trends over the next three to five years, develop an investment thesis around them, and come with ideas of his own.

A related executive update is the recent addition of Rob Bearden, COO and president of HortonWorks, the Hadoop services provider that spinned off Yahoo, to Gluster’s board. Gluster is a maker of open-source storage software.

Cloudera also had some news lately. Yesterday we’ve learned that it teamed up with Dell to integrate its Hadoop distribution with the hardware manufacturer’s servers. Customers will leverage Crowbar, Dell’s open-source installer, to significantly reduce deployment time from days to a matter of hours.

Hortonworks separated from Yahoo, which owns a sizable stake of the brand new initiative, to enter this competitive market in a way the team would not be able to if it were still a part of the company.  The latter is taking an aggressive approach to try to avoid the fate many have stamped on its head, and announced a new web-based media player. In addition to playing videos, the beta application also has some search and syncing capabilities to support a smoother user experience.