What makes winning data-driven solutions? Insights from Cloudera EVOLVE24

Cloudera's EVOLVE24 event, which took place this week at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, put the spotlight on the power of data, the necessity of data security, and the reality of hybrid infrastructure to underpin operational efficiency and growth.

Over the course of keynotes and conversations, Charles Sansbury, Cloudera CEO, emphasised the size of Cloudera's customer base, the scale of data the company manages, the research and development (R&D) spend, and the ever growing revenue of the company. More specifically, he recounted that Cloudera is used by the Global 2000 - as identified by Forbes, manages more than 25 exabytes of data, has yielded $1 billion in revenue and counting, and has hit $1 billion in R&D spend.

Sansbury and other Cloudera executives, as well as top performing customers from the APAC region, spoke over the course of the event about what drives these numbers. While each use case differs by existing infrastructure, technical requirements and desired business outcomes, a few key themes emerged: hybrid data, analytics and AI are fundamental markers for success.

As Sansbury opened the event, he highlighted what makes Cloudera stand out, saying the company:

• Supports the entire data lifecycle - allowing organisations to manage data from end to end and run business intelligence (BI), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and streaming analytics on the same data, without data silos.
• Is secure by design, allowing IT to deploy fully secured and governed data lakes faster, giving more users access to more data. 
• Has an Enterprise AI ecosystem comprising of partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), NVIDIA, and Pinecone to help customers unlock the full potential of AI in an easier, more affordable and more secure manner.
• Acquired Verta's Operational AI Platform in June 2024 to strengthen and accelerate its operational AI capabilities, supporting businesses to create AI applications and drive Gen AI initiatives on a trusted enterprise data foundation. 

As cited by Sansbury, 93% of businesses are moving to hybrid and multi-cloud solutions in order to adapt to change and maximise analytics capabilities, 40% are adopting modern data architectures to simplify data and analytics processes, and 76% are deploying enterprise AI technologies in order to improve operations. Cloudera, in offering what it dubs as 'the only true hybrid platform', caters to each of these three strategic pillars.

When Abhas Ricky, Cloudera's Chief Strategy Officer, took to the stage he emphasised the acceleration of enterprise AI, the growing value in data science platforms, and Cloudera's value proposition in allowing customers to realise a true hybrid environment. According to Ricky, 'true hybrid' allows customers to write once and deploy anywhere.

Using one platform for both data management and analytics, there's no requirement to rewrite in order to move apps, data and users between cloud and on-premises, he said. Cloudera allows customers to move data from private to public cloud and vice versa, and also run operations in a multi environment that's optimised for total cost of ownership (TCO). Modern data architectures are open data lakehouses, Cloudera attests, where businesses can offload workloads and reduce TCO, with real-time data accommodating a variety of business applications.

As Ricky stated, having greater clarity and control over data is also huge for enterprise AI. Cloudera enables businesses to bring their AI models to the data and not the other way around. In being able to create, run and empower AI applications and assistants through Cloudera's platform, businesses are able to maximise the benefits of having trusted data for enterprise AI functions.

Priyank Patel, Vice President of AI/ML Products at Cloudera, reiterated Cloudera's June announcement of three new AI-driven assistants - SQL AI Assistant, AI Chatbot in Cloudera Data Visualization, and Cloudera Copilot for Cloudera Machine Learning - that empower customers to accelerate the development of data, analytics and AI business applications and gain more valuable data analysis. 

The winners of this year's Cloudera Data Impact Awards showcase how the functionality of Cloudera's offerings can be used in innovative ways and have a widespread impact. The awards aim to recognise outstanding data-driven projects that have made a significant business impact within their organisations, across industries, and globally. At EVOLVE24 the categories included:

• AI acceleration: Organisations making an innovative business impact using Cloudera for trusted data powering AI, Machine Learning, Large Language Models, and more. 
• Cloud (native) innovation: Organisations leveraging cloud-native architectures for innovative data, analytics and AI, using one or more public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) and/or private, on-prem infrastructure. 
• Modernised architectures & pipelines: Organisations that have excelled in designing and implementing innovative data architectures that effectively support the full data lifecycle - from ingestion to analytics. 
• Leadership and transformation: Teams and/or data leaders driving transformation with Cloudera and programs that promote enterprise-wide impact, data literacy, transparent decision-making, and tools that empower employees to effectively use data. 
• People and society: Recognising data's broader implications,with initiatives that extend beyond organisational walls and financial impact. Whether through community engagement, environmental sustainability, or public health initiatives, they highlight data's positive influence on the world at large.

Winners from APAC included the Australian Federal Police for ANZ, Bank of Thailand for ASEAN, OCBC bank, Kakao Pay and the Japanese Research Institute.

With a bold strategic roadmap and an ongoing request for customers to drive their own innovation forward, the Cloudera team appeared confident in not only their current offerings but that they will continue to drive growth for their business and their customers.