The Six Five team discusses Cloudera Evolve.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Pat, you got back from New York, but not without an update from Cloudera. Tell us what was going on at Cloudera.
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t even know what that question means or what that introduction means. You and I were both in New York City for more insights and strategy, Futurum Group, and The Six Five. So we took in all the analysts’ content, but we were also there… we had five interviews with multiple executives, including the CEO, a few partners, but let me break this down here. Cloudera is a data management company, and there’s a lot of companies that say that that’s what they do. For instance, you have ransomware protection, you have data protection. You have security companies calling themselves data management, but Cloudera is a little bit unique, and it tracks all the way from the inflow of that data, cleaning up that data, many times storing that data, let’s say in a data lakehouse that’s based on Iceberg, and then getting it ready for analytics, machine learning, deploying inference to the edge and then being able to track all that data, who should have access to it, the lineage of it, how it changed, who has it.
So essentially, if a regulator comes in like they do, particularly in finance and healthcare that says, “Hey, I want to every bit of data that you have that’s in the entire enterprise, who has access to it? How are you protecting it when it changes?” The key here for this event was this was their big AI, generative AI play. I think people who understand this understand that garbage in, garbage out, you’ve got to have data, the right data to put in there, but things really changed with generative AI. While most of generative AI is domain specific, really, it’s going to be a future that is going to be commingling ERP data, CX data, finance data, confidential information, public information, and that exasperates the data challenge.
So there were really one big announcement across three players, and this was an official partner network, and Cloudera introduced AWS, Pinecone and Nvidia. A lot of the conversations on why they chose them is industry leading; industry leading GPU, industry leading IAS provider. At least by every metric I’ve seen AWS is the AI, IaaS leader in terms of the amount of revenue that they generate, Pinecone, when it comes to vector database and Nvidia being Nvidia, training and inference. But first and foremost, I hope the takeaway was, and this is not a new takeaway for us, was that if you have a hardcore AI or generative AI, you need a data management platform that spans all of that.
I’ve been very vocal that it’s been a big disappointment from a lot of on-prem plays that they don’t articulate what the data management platform is, is they just ignore it. While we would expect Cloudera to lead with that ’cause they’re a data management company, that doesn’t not make it true. It is true. Oh, by the way, the public cloud folks all have an end-to-end data management platform. Their biggest challenge is, “How do I get the data on-prem?” The number you and I throw around 75 to 90% of enterprise data being on-prem, how do you activate that in the public cloud? So anyways, I’ll leave it at that. It was a big event. I think Cloudera has a big opportunity ahead of them. I think they’ve got a big marketing challenge ahead of them as well. They’re a PE-owned firm, and they’re going against folks who can at the same revenue level, can spend 10X more on the marketing than they can afford.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think you hit a lot of the really important points. First of all, it’s a new look Cloudera, starts with the management team. Charles Sansbury is CEO, he’s bringing in new leaders. If you go to year to year, it’s a very different look, feel. The company is making some commitments to get away from its deep engineering geeky roots that I think have plagued it a bit in terms of adoption. At the same time, the company still benefits of being a majority stakeholder of data management for five plus of the largest companies in every major industry which are using Cloudera. Now, I’ll say it here, I’ll say it there. They need to show that A, they can create growth with those customers. Meaning it’s not just legacy Hadoop, it’s these customers are going to use and expand their current spend, so it’s land and expand, and then it’s new customer acquisition.
If Cloudera really is up with the times, which we believe it is, I believe it is, it needs to be able to show its muscle by winning new big customers that say this is the platform we want to trust our future to. We want to build our company’s data future to be able to solve AI, generative AI, analytical AI problems. So I felt that was on display. Some more customer cases, more partner focused, a little less geek, but at the same time that developer ecosystem has to be served, so it’s a nuanced challenge.
My early inclination is to say Charles seems prepared to play the role in that leadership space. I think in our conversations with him, he seems to be on the right track, saying the right things. Also, it was good to meet Mary Wells, their new CMO. She brings a wealth of experience and seems to buy into a lot of what you and I have been saying the company needs, which is those case studies. It’s those reflective large user wins and the ability to articulate those from a value and solution standpoint, not just from the technology. So good event, good to be there. Good to see you there, buddy. Sad you’re not here with me right now today, sitting side by side with our sunglasses on in the Hawaiian sun. Oh wait, I’m in New York, forget it.
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.
