Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud Gives Partners Heft

Channel partners who help enterprises extract and act on big data from their cloud environments have another option from Cloudera. The company last fall launched Cloudera Data Platform, which works with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. But Cloudera had yet to address the private side of the house — until now.

The vendor has unveiled Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud. Designed for hybrid environments, the open-source product connects on-premises environments to public clouds and enables self-service analytics. Partners (and/or their clients) can spin resources up and down, just as they can with public cloud. Along the way, Cloudera’s technology ensures security and governance.

Another important feature: Cloudera built the new private cloud solution (and its public counterpart) with IBM Red Hat’s OpenShift. As a result, Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud workloads port across public and private clouds. The how and why get fairly technical. It all boils down to managed Kubernetes services from AWS et al and, on the private side, Red Hat’s capabilities — that and Cloudera’s move away from Hadoop after the Hortonworks merger. Here’s how Gary Green, vice president of strategic partnerships at Cloudera, explained it to Channel Futures:

Cloudera’s Gary Green

“CDP Data Center is the storage layer of CDP Private Cloud. CDP Private Cloud adds a separate compute layer that is a containerized compute cloud (using Red Hat OpenShift currently),” Green said. “With the compute layer, CDP Private Cloud offers a set of analytic experiences that are self-service and easy to use; the focus is on the data, not the cluster infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, he added, “Cloudera Data Warehouse and Cloudera Machine Learning will be available as experiences in this initial release, with more experiences available later this year. Customers will also be able to run bare metal workloads using the components of their choice (Hive, Spark, HBase, Impala, Kafka, NiFi, etc.) on the nodes that make up the storage layer of CDP Private Cloud for maximum flexibility.”

What Partners Can Expect

In terms of capabilities, channel partners can expect the following:

Overall, resellers, system integrators and managed service providers have another tool for clients’ big data initiatives. That could sound like recirculated hype, of course, except that “big data” has the power to help organizations make strategic decisions — and channel partners have grown more essential to those efforts.

That’s especially true amid COVID-19. The pandemic has forced many an organization to unexpectedly support remote work, which cloud services enable. IT teams worldwide have deployed those resources in response to the novel coronavirus, although in many cases, with little planning. From a micro perspective, now marks an opportune time for enterprises, with the help of partners, to capture, analyze and respond to the data trends and patterns COVID-19 has created within their businesses.

Regardless of the impetus for parsing big data across clouds, the debut of Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud gives the channel …

… options for clients.

“Our partners can benefit from helping customers leverage hybrid cloud architectures to ensure workloads are running in the environments that make the most sense for them — private, public or both,” Green said.

And in terms of teaming with Cloudera, partners may choose what works best for them.

“We … know that our partners’ business models are diverse and varied; hence, we want to provide adaptable selling models – co-sell, resell, embed, hosting – and [incentivize] them accordingly,” Green said. “Partners can sell both cloud and on-premises products, allowing them the flexibility to benefit from selling a hybrid cloud data strategy.”

Plus, partners can add services on top of Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud sales. Green recommended providing more consulting and deploying complementary solutions. IT departments and line-of-business units both make for good sales prospects, he said.

‘Completing the Enterprise Data Cloud Vision’

Channel partners intent on aiding customers’ growth and decision-making through the use of big data will want to take note of Cloudera’s new private cloud platform. Indeed, Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research, called the product “important for completing the enterprise data cloud vision.”

“Enterprise IT departments will now be able to use the platform to deliver any analytic function on any cloud,” Newman wrote in a June 12 research memo. “I believe this supports digital transformation efforts to work with data at greater speed while also providing the agility the business wants with the security and governance complexities that come with working with broad data sets from vast sources including real-time and on-demand data.”

Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud remains in preview mode for select customers. Cloudera intends to make the platform generally available later this summer.

The unveiling of Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud comes as rumors churn that Cloudera either will sell to a large private equity firm or agree to be acquired by Red Hat parent IBM.