In AI Today met with Cloudera CEO Charles Sansbury at EVOLVE24 in New York
By Cameron Dart, Editor in Chief at In AI Today
Last week I was a very honored guest of Cloudera’s at their EVOLVE24 in New York City.
First item on the agenda was having the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Cloudera’s Chief Executive Officer, Charles Sansbury (pictured onstage at EVOLVE24).
Charles Sansbury has more than 20 years’ experience in strategic, financial, and operational leadership roles across the software industry, and has been CEO of Cloudera since August 2023.
I sat down with Charles to discuss the current success of Cloudera and future of the company.
Cameron Dart (CD): Of all the recent information I’ve read about Cloudera, what stands out to me Charles is number of top enterprises globally that choose Cloudera: 9/10 top global insurance companies, 8/10 top global banks, 8/10 top global automakers, 7/10 top global pharma companies and the list goes on.
They are very impressive statistics.
Charles Sansbury (CS): In all the Cloudera presentations, this is my favorite slide.
CD: So, as an example, Cloudera have 8 out of 10 top global banks as customers – is the aim to get to 10 out of 10 across the board? Or is it more about serving your existing customers better?
CS: When I was taking on this job, it was very validating to know that Cloudera was foundational in the early stages of the big data market – we kind of founded the idea of huge pools of data made available for, first of all, analysis and then action decision-making, and that evolved into AI. So the challenge is the largest companies with revenue above $20 billion, half of them are our customers, and then you’ve got the global 2000 and the majority of them are our customers as well, so the challenge is we’ve got this incredible set of customers and use cases where these companies are using Cloudera’s data and analytics platform to actually inform and help make business decisions. And so what is the right growth strategy?
Within our install base of customers – which is the set of customers that everybody else wants – we look at how we can expand the use of the technology through new offerings around things like observability, to be able to observe workloads across multiple platforms or expanding their use of other technologies, for example, our data float to move data into and out of places, but then if we have 8 out of 10 banks I see it differently – what about banks 11 through 20, and 21 through 30, because the 11th through to the 30th banks – probably which right now half of those are our customers – they all are having data challenges that they didn’t have two or three years ago. Many of them will have had piecemeal or half-done solutions and also now faced with ‘if we can get our data analytics a state in shape, we can drive a lot of analytics to insight and insight to action’, but we first have that foundation of data. We were still a large company solution and what we sell is a very performant platform that is most useful in these large use cases, so it’s really going a little bit further down into the global 2000 companies that maybe didn’t have as big data problem few years ago they do today, and helping that group.
But what we’re not is a kind of a consumer brand and we’re not going to sell to small medium size companies. So it’s really more about going one or two rungs down the ladder and these are still multi-billion dollar companies with either national or international reputations. In places like Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, each of those countries have a smaller set of leaders and almost invariably we serve those leaders in those geographies.
CD: Cloudera is a global company and is almost everywhere but are there other regions that you’re looking at to expand into in the future? Or are you concentrating on the regions that you already serve?
CS: Cloudera are very well penetrated in most of the large English-speaking countries and regions. Some of the more emerging places like Central Europe, the Middle East, some countries in Asia and some specific countries in Western Europe, are places where probably just by virtue of how we grew or didn’t grow geographically, we don’t have too much presence there and those are places that are spending very aggressively to kind of ‘catch up’. So we have a beachhead of customers in all those places but probably have even more growth opportunities in some of those more emerging sectors. It’s kind of like back in the day, the Scandinavian telco providers ultimately had terrible landline service because the geography of their land was so hilly and then when they moved to cellular, all of a sudden they had the best service in the world because it did away with the geographic impediments, and they had great coverage and so they went from being behind to being ahead when they implemented cellular. A lot of the emerging companies are learning from what we’ve done in Australia, North America and in Western Europe and saying we can learn from that and jump to the best solution. We’re also seeing a lot of those companies in those places are also investing very aggressively in data analytics and AI in a way to try to become world class. We’re seeing a lot of urgency in those places.
CD: Charles you mentioned about issues that some companies were having transitioning – is that transitioning away from, say, legacy systems to Cloudera, and the new way of doing things?
CS: People have been storing data in systems for a long time and I think historically, number one, data has moved faster than anybody anticipated, even since the time we started storing data, and, number two, a lot of technologies grew up that it turned out were more siloed in nature and what companies we think are figuring out is, to have a complete picture of enterprise data and bring that together in one place for analysis and decision making is very important, and it’s very hard to do when the data is siloed, so there is what we call it a data engineering exercise – an ETL exercise – where you transform the data into a form and a format that’s useful for analytics to feed and training your machine learning and ultimately AI models. And that work is more infrastructure-driven in nature.
A lot of companies are being confronted with the fact that we have to build a foundation first before we start building on top of it and so we think the focus in the last 12-18 months is that people are very excited about initial AI use cases but then companies are realizing that actually their foundation isn’t in order. We are also very helpful with our data engineering and our data management capabilities, and helping to get companies to a foundational part where they can even start to try to operationalize AI.
It’s never as much fun building the foundation as it is actually building stuff that you can see, touch and feel.
CD: As CEO is of this very impressive company, what do you see as successes for you as CEO?
CS: In terms of scale, as a global company with more than a billion dollars in revenue, we are growing profitability and investing a lot. We’re actually investing more than we ever have in the business right now but I’ve also learned that you know financial goals aren’t compelling to anybody except for investors. Investors are very important but really what I’ve try to do is to get people focused on the opportunity going forward which I’d say is the ‘data analytics platform of choice for the world’s best companies and helping them solve their most complex data and analytics problems’ – so that is really the end goal.
One of the key areas that we focus on involves enabling hybrid infrastructure. The largest companies in the world have on-premises capabilities with private cloud and increasingly using the public cloud as well, and we want to give them the flexibility with our technology platform to move workloads and computing jobs to public cloud, private cloud or on-premises, based on whatever the optimal platform is for that workload. Some workloads are short term in nature, for example, maybe it’s a trial that should be cloud-based – something is going to run all day, every day, should run on your own hardware. Giving people focus from that hybrid capability around modern data architecture and enabling their AI initiatives – if we do all those things well and then in 18 or 24 months these companies look to Cloudera beyond just providing data storage management and analytics, but to also being their analytics and AI provider of choice, then I’ll look back on that with great pride and what will come out of that is better financial dynamics, growth in the business and a higher profile. Those are secondary impacts but really taking the company from being a very important part of that data analytics world, from going from important to strategic for more of our customers and claiming that ground which arguably should own, to me would be success, and then a lot of the quantitative metrics will fall out of that.
CD: It seems to me that Cloudera wants to work with companies / its customers, rather than building a product and saying ‘you need to buy this’.
CS: If you think about a large bank in any geography – they’ve grown by acquisition, they’ve grown across geography, and they have a data architecture that is by definition kind of ‘accidental’, based on what they bought and when they bought it, so they’re not starting from a nice clean sheet of paper. Therefore we have to work with these very complex architectures and so we can add a lot of value by helping them simplify what is at its core – typically a very siloed data and analytics infrastructure. This again is probably one of the biggest challenges that our customers – who are these large global companies – are facing and it’s that whole problem of data being in a bunch of different places and how do we pull it together and drive analytics across the data set that we understand and trust, and then to take actionable business decisions from that data.
The other thing that’s interesting, is when I joined the company a year ago, the ‘cloud’ was all you heard about and cloud is a super important and critical part of infrastructure, but increasingly what people are seeing is there’s a realization now that this hybrid architecture is the end-point architecture for large global organizations, which means people are rethinking what simple percentage of workloads will move to the cloud and which will remain on their premises, and they are often different answers – some companies still want 2/3 or some companies would say a hundred or so workers on the cloud – that’s aspirational but the realities for large companies is probably going to be less than half and someone to third half, and so when you think about it from that perspective, you have a very different view of what my internal technology footprint needs to look like. And even in the past year, what I just said went from being a kind of ‘interesting statement’ to being ‘yeah that’s how it’s going to play out’, and that does benefit our approach and that Cloudera are the only vendor that provides these hybrid management capabilities. All that gives us an exciting opportunity but also means we’ve got a lot of work to do to meet some very rigorous performance requirements for our customers.
CD: In relation to the past year, the talk and chatter in relation to anything AI-related has gone crazy. With AI technology, do you see that technology continuing to evolve, or are we going to plateau at some point, somewhere soon?
CS: There’s so much money in AI at the moment and I’ve heard nothing from any customers anywhere saying that they want to slow down their exploration and implementation of AI-based technology for business decision-making. There’s a pace at which you can ‘digest’ and right now things are moving incredibly fast.
The technology is moving faster in most cases then organizations can absorb it, but that’s kind of where we are in this market – it’s in the very early stages and we don’t yet know what the killer use cases will be for AI-based technology.
If you look back, I used the example of how we got 5G networks and geographic location data – we didn’t really see how an application like Uber could use those components to create a market that wasn’t there, but they did. And there are going to be other companies that create markets that aren’t there today, based on the combination of access to high-speed analytics and predictive and generative analytics. Right now we’re so early on but I think the technology is moving faster than our ability to consume it, but that’s exciting.
CD: With AI, it seems like a race to the top but we don’t know where the top is. Charles, I liked your reference to ‘digestion’ – are we digesting this technology as we’re going along? Or are we just coming up with another product and then another product after that?
CS: I think larger customers that have more of a historical framework around which to build, their pace of digestion is slower because they have more things and more variables you have to consider when adopting new technologies. But one of the reasons why I like markets like technology, is it’s always exciting – there’s always innovation and what I appreciate is situations where you can both adopt and utilize innovation but also leverage what’s there to use the innovation to both extend the value of what’s there but also create new opportunity – making the ‘old’ work with a ‘new’ – and in some cases it makes the ‘new’ even more valuable.
I’ve been doing this for a while and I often say, ‘new technologies never proliferate as fast as we think they will, and old ones never go away as fast as we think they will’. That’s because each of them has good things about them and nothing is optimal for every use case.
CD: In banking there have been lots of old legacy systems trying to convert them to new systems and in the past, there have often been issues.
CS: There’s been a huge rush to adopt cloud-based technologies and in some cases maybe going too fast.
I think it’s the case that technology markets generally can kind of over-correct and we’re just trying to figure out where true north is and what is the appropriate end state architecture. Our belief is it’s a mix of critical cloud-based technologies but also be on-premises and private cloud capabilities, and for these largest companies finding that right mix is going to be the kind of the true north architecture.
CD: Thank you for your time Charles, it’s been very knowledgeable to get your insights into Cloudera and the industry as a whole.
CS: Thank you.
Stay tuned for more articles from Cloudera’s EVOLVE24.
