Cloudera, the only true hybrid platform for data, analytics and AI
Cloudera is the only true hybrid platform for data, analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). With 100 times more data under management than other cloud-only vendors, Cloudera empowers global enterprises to transform data of all types, on any public or private cloud, into valuable, trusted insights.
Cloudera enable global enterprises to use data to solve their business challenges and to companies to transform any data anywhere into valuable insight you can trust. In addition, Cloudera delivers scalable open and secure data management with portable, cloud native data analytics.
During Cloudera’s recent EVOLVE24 conference, all this was clearly on display, but there was much more details to be found.
To get more of a perspective, three key personnel discussed different yet very important aspects of Cloudera – Abhas Ricky, Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer, discussed strategy and listening to its customers; Venkat Rajaji, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Cloudera, detailed how products come to realization; and Cloudera’s Chief AI Architect, Manasi Vartak, revealed the importance of a role like hers and the acquisition by Cloudera of her company, Verta.
The following gives just a small insight into the thoughts and processes that are keeping Cloudera at the head of the pack in relation to data, AI and analytics, and also how Cloudera works internally, and more importantly, externally, for the good of their customers.
Abhas Ricky, Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer, talked about the three core themes from a Cloudera perspective that they hear from their customers, stating, “Number one is the world is moving towards agentic applications so there’s a concept of cognitive enterprise that we believe everyone will get to – agents are able to take the actions on your behalf and that’s where we’re enabling agentic workflows, we’re enabling cognition as a service capabilities for organizations.
“Second one is – whether it’s AI or machine learning or data science – AI is a team sport. But you still have to get the data in, you still have to do the data prep before you can serve it up to do prompting, fine tuning, modelling, RAG applications. So over a longer time we believe that it will become incredibly important as to how easy is it for you to get high fidelity data so that you can run the models on top of that to get high fidelity outputs. That high fidelity data is all about trust, so you have to be able to trust the data that you are going to use to train your models on. We do believe there will be increasing amount of focus on trust.
“The third point is, after cognition as a service and trust, people want to be able to build AI applications at a price point of their choice because computers are expensive right now and prohibitive in certain cases because of the lack of availability of GPU’s and everything else. So a lot of the things that we’re trying to do here at Cloudera is around hardware acceleration so that companies can scale their workloads on GPU’s, on private cloud and get significant advantages.
When discussing Cloudera’s products and how they come to fruition, Venkat Rajaji, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Cloudera, gave some great insights, saying, “Cloudera is not a ‘one off’ shop – so what we like to do is to get input from customers, as many customers as possible, to see is if this is a problem and then we ask ‘Do we have enough of this problem in the marketplace?’ and ‘Is there enough value for us to go and solve this problem?’. And if there is enough value for us to go solve this problem then we’ll build a business case which will involve assessing how much value is actually out there for us to solve this problem.
“And from there, to actually make the product, we work with our engineering teams and provide requirements based on customer feedback and customer information, and then the engineers can actually go build the software. They build the software and we then launch that product, support it from an enablement perspective for our sales teams to be able to sell, and for our professional services team to be able to implement and deliver, and for our customer support teams of course take customer feedback so that they can actually resolve issues as well. So in product management, that’s really what we do.”
When Manasi Vartak was asked about the importance of a role like hers – Chief AI Architect – Vartak said, “We are certainly seeing more Chief AI Officers, AI Architects and Head of AI positions in the last couple of years. I think it’s actually a pretty critical role because with AI it can be applied everywhere and similar to how we’ve seen Chief Data Officers proliferate. I see this as a trend, as AI is used everywhere across a business it needs to be centralized somewhere and so going forward, we are going to see more of the need for these roles.
Vartak was previously the Founder of Verta, which Cloudera acquired in June 2024. Commenting on what Cloudera saw in the value of Verta, Vartak added, “At Verta we were working on operationalizing AI, which means taking it out from the labs and putting it to work within businesses, so we can take it and we can run our business on AI. There had been a CML platform already within Cloudera that was being built and this was a really great complementary fit to what had been built and Generative AI was taking off – as everyone saw – and we were doing some pretty interesting work there with the GenAI workbench – so we are launching the RAG studio which is the first piece of Verta technology that’s getting integrated into the Cloudera stack, and so with GenAI there were really good synergies with what we developed at Verta and where Cloudera was going. It was a great fit.”
Getting these great insights from these leaders at Cloudera was more than just words – there was passion in what they were saying and an incredibly strong belief in the business while also being very commercial with their customers in mind.
This company is going places – and fast!
