The Six Five team discusses Cloudera Elevate 2025 SKO Event.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: “Place two of the funnest, most thoughtful, most fun, kindest, fairest analysts on stage at a global sales kickoff in Miami, Florida, and have them look like they’re having a lot of fun talking about data management and AI.”
Patrick Moorhead: Hang on a second. “Beep, beep, boop, beep. Producers, can you put something up there that showed Dan and I having a ton of fun?” Maybe we can. There we go, baby. Let’s go, Dan, go.
Daniel Newman: There it is. Look at this-
Patrick Moorhead: Thank you, producers.
Daniel Newman: … plus customer interviews that we’ve done on Six Five, Pat and I have never shared a keynote stage together. We’ve both done tons of these, but we had the opportunity to head out to Hollywood, Florida, north of Miami-
Patrick Moorhead: And where is that, Dan? Where’s Miami?
Daniel Newman: North of Miami, south of Fort Lauderdale, on the beach. We might’ve taken a stroll up the beach, done some of the planning in the morning together, but no, Pat, we didn’t hold hands, but-
Patrick Moorhead: We should have.
Daniel Newman: … a really important moment for a company that has so much to bring. Now, again, you’re talking about a company with an exponentially larger amount of data under management than the likes of Databricks, Snowflake, and other sort of born on cloud. Great photos, great photos. I love it. This is also a company that has real challenges to earn the market’s respect as a high-growth data management platform that is readying the enterprise for AI. So when we were there, that’s what I was listening for. We were there to provide our outside-end perspective as analysts as to what these companies need to do to compete in the market. And of course, to better understand the opportunities that a company like Cloudera has with a true kind of born on enterprise, data center first, hybrid, multi-cloud fabric designed for compliant, governed data management that can be utilized for AI.
Seven to eight months ago, company really didn’t have much of an AI story. Under the new leadership of Charles Sansbury, CEO, and the team that he’s brought in, Mary Wells, a CMO, we’ve seen incremental and meaningful improvement in that story in just a short period of time. But there needs to be more. And that was what you and I, I believe, challenged and at the same time, shared that, “Hey, we see a lot of potential. You have all these customers.” What do they have? It’s about half of the Fortune 1,000. It was a number that Charles said. It’s a big number, though, that used , and it’s a big, big number of companies out there in that sort of multi-hundred billion plus that all trust Cloudera for data management. Having said that, a lot of challenges coming from different directions. I think they are more prepared than I’ve seen over the last three or four years.
We’ve been tracking them for… I have been tracking them over half a decade, I think you a little bit longer, more prepared to innovate. But like I said, it’s more necessary than ever before that they get their AI story quickly in market and get it right. And by the way, look out in the market for Patrick and I’s sit downs with Charles. We did a sit down with Charles, not just on stage on The Six Five, with their new chief product officer Dito, and then Abhas Ricky, their chief strategy officer, Pat. So good day, good event. Great to be on there. And buddy, great to share a stage with you. I know know your short torso made you look a little bit shorter than I did when we sat down, but it was so fun to be up there with you.
Patrick Moorhead: The camera made me look like I’d been sitting in a tanning bed for like 12 hours before.
Daniel Newman: Had you? Had you?
Patrick Moorhead: But we did take a stroll on the beach together before we had breakfast together, though.
Daniel Newman: I said, we strolled gently.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so I’m going to hit on the big opportunity here. So I do want to say categorically that a data management platform that only leverages the public cloud is a dead end. It’s kind of like the same thinking 10 years ago that, “Only do the public cloud.” The reality is that you have data and you have infrastructure, heck, on mainframes on x86 servers, on prem, on private cloud, on prem, on sovereign clouds, private clouds. You also have data obviously in hyper-scaler services, and you have data that is from SaaS applications.
So data is everywhere. And if you don’t have a data management platform that scales across all those areas, it really is a dead end, and you’re putting yourself in a position that you don’t want to be as an enterprise. Cloudera’s challenge is to get that out there and sell that hard, to not only… By the way, their current customer base is gigantic. And I think the last time we checked, they have more data, enterprise data under management than any other company out there.
Daniel Newman: Definitely more than Snowbricks or Dataflake. I’m joking. I just like to combine that. So Snowflake and Databricks.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, and quite frankly, the opportunity with generative AI think is amplified, in that for the first time, we’re commingling data sets that have never been commingled under machine learning. Things like ERP, CRM, CX, product development data, legal data, HRM, HCM, SCM, all the buzzwords you can think of. And anytime that you move data, it’s at risk. And anytime you commingle data, particularly generative AI, you have a risk. And that data needs to be managed. And the company that’s managing pretty much all of the highly regulated industries is Cloudera. So I think this is Cloudera’s opportunity to lose or to win, depending on how you look at it. They need to get their customers talking about what they do, either on the record completely or anonymously to show others. And they need to go after born-in-the-cloud folks
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
