Cloudera EVOLVE24 – it’s a wrap!
By Cameron Dart, Editor in Chief at In AI Today
Last week I had the honor of being a guest at Cloudera’s EVOLVE24 event in New York City.
EVOVLE24 showcased Cloudera’s partnerships – existing and new – as well as product launches and the overall current success of Cloudera and the future aspirations of this exciting company.
EVOLVE24 kicked off at Chelsea Piers in New York with Cloudera Chief Revenue Officer Frank O’Dowd (pictured above) highlighting the current success of Cloudera to date, and Cloudera’s momentum going forward.
O’Dowd’s statistics included Cloudera being a leader of hybrid adoption and 60% of the top 2000 companies being customers. Other key highlights were that Cloudera now has in excess of 25 Exabytes of data under management and there is record growth across the board in all facets of the company.
One of the most impressive facts presented – and previously discussed in person with Cloudera CEO Charles Sansbury – was the number of global enterprises that Cloudera already have onboard, including 8 out of the top 10 banks, 9 out of the top 10 telcos, 6 out of the top 10 technology companies, and the list goes on and on.
Cloudera CEO Charles Sansbury (pictured above) was next on stage. The visionary leader of Cloudera discussed the foundational past and exciting future of Cloudera.
One of Sansbury’s key highlights was that Cloudera now achieves over $1 billion in annual revenue and that number is growing.
Sansbury also highlighted his own reasons as to why he’s excited about Cloudera’s future including the great products Cloudera have and how those products are market leaders globally. In addition, Sansbury referred to the success of Cloudera’s global scale with world-class customers, and the aligned and supportive stakeholders of the Cloudera business.
Partnerships and product launches were both the backbone and key highlights of EVOLVE24.
Abhas Ricky, Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer (pictured above), announced the world’s first True Hybrid partnership between Cloudera and Snowflake. Cloudera’s integration with Snowflake will bring enterprises an open, unified hybrid data lakehouse, powered by Apache Iceberg. Now, enterprises can leverage the combination of Cloudera and Snowflake — two best-of-breed tools for ingestion, processing and consumption of data — for a single source of truth across all data, analytics, and AI workloads.
In addition to Cloudera’s partnership with Snowflake, Cloudera’s other Enterprise AI ecosystem members include AWS, Google Cloud, NVIDIA, Anthropic and Pinecone.
Ricky also discussed the 3 key strategic highlights for 2025 being to deliver true hybrid, enable modern data architecture and accelerate enterprise AI.
Dipto Chakravarty, Chief product Officer and Venkat Rajaji, SVP of Product Management (both pictured above) outlined new products launching now and in the near future, including the launch of AI Studios to rapidly build Generative AI applications and agents and the upcoming integration with Apache Trino.
The pair also discussed the ease in infusing, running and building AI with Cloudera, and how Cloudera helps enterprises take back control of key elements such as data, workloads, deployments and spending.
In addition to internal Cloudera speakers and their customers, there were two other guest speakers – the education and thought-provoking Ray Wang, and the inspiring and motivational Chad Foster.
Ray Wang, CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc., leapt on stage like a Labrador Retriever puppy – but with the brains of a genius – and kept everyone hanging on every word with his energy and enthusiasm, while having the audience constantly thinking about what’s going to be trending over the next 5 years and who do you partner with to complete the last mile?
The event wrapped up with guest keynote speaker Chad Foster, who shared his insights gained from going blind at 21, and bouncing back to build massive enterprise value at key organizations like Red Hat and Accenture.
Chad provided some great motivational and inspirational words, with a dash of humor and humility, and how data and AI can be woven into everyday lives, no matter what your abilities or disabilities are.
From the Women Leaders in Technology kicked off followed by breakout sessions on topics such as Accelerate Enterprise AI, Modern Data Architecture for Trusted Data, and Delivering True Hybrid. There were also two hands on labs: Enterprise AI / Machine learning and Data Lakehouse. The final session involved an executive round table discussion focused on Financial Services & Insurance.
From an outsider, EVOVLE24 was a steep learning curve into Cloudera’s amazing capabilities, team, and why the company is the leader in cloud data analytics and AI, now and will be into the future.
Cloudera’s next EVOLVE24 events for the remainder of 2024 are:
- Milan, Italy – October 23
- Paris, France – November 14
- Madrid, Spain – December 10
For more information Cloudera, please visit their website here,
For more information on Cloudera’s EVOLVE events, please visit here.
