Cloudera: Partners in 'Unique Position' to Help Enterprises Handle Data Challenges with New Platform

Cloudera late last month launched Cloudera Data Platform, analytics as a service enterprises may use through any cloud provider, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and others, as well as in private and hybrid configurations.

In this Q&A with Jess Tan, managing senior director, global alliances and channels, for Cloudera, Channel Futures follows up on the news announced at the O’Reilly Strata Data Conference on Sept. 25 to learn more about what it means for resellers, system integrators and managed service providers.

Overall, Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) opens a number of new opportunities for partners, Tan said. In general, partners may use CDP to help migrate enterprises’ critical analytic workloads to the cloud, to offer infrastructure plans, to develop data strategies, and more, Tan said. Read more details in this edited transcript.

CF: Is it fair to say that CDP is the cloud version of what was Cloudera’s on-premises platform? That seems to be some confusion around that.

JT: To clarify, enterprise data cloud is a new category, and Cloudera Data Platform is our product. CDP is not a cloud version of an on-premises product, but rather, an entirely new approach to data.

Cloudera’s Jess Tan

Enterprises typically struggle to make the public cloud a part of their overall data architectures as they seek to become data-driven. In response, Cloudera partnered with Harvard Business Review Analytics to best understand what enterprises need to complete their journey to the public cloud, and what features and capabilities they need to best leverage all of their data.

The problems enterprises identified included: complexity, diversifying functionality, regulatory compliance and accessibility. In fact, 69% of executives said their organization needs a comprehensive data strategy to meet their goals, yet only 35% think their current strategy is sufficient.

We realized that previous data management was not sufficient — the data had outgrown the system. The answer, we found, pointed to a solution that requires four important attributes: operation on any cloud, multifunctionality, security and governance, and 100% openness. These four attributes create what we call the enterprise data cloud, and it’s a new category of technology needed to succeed in today’s multicloud, data-driven world.

CDP is unique because it is made up entirely of open-source elements, is available for the user anywhere, has advanced security and governance measures, and can function from the edge to AI.

CF: What does this news mean, in plain language, for resellers, system integrators and managed service providers?

JT: CDP is the industry’s first enterprise data cloud. It delivers powerful, self-service data and analytics across hybrid and multicloud environments with the granular security and governance policies that IT leaders demand.

It also unlocks new opportunities for Cloudera partners:

CF: What enablement materials/support is Cloudera providing to …

… the aforementioned partner types as they sell CDP?

JT: We provide the following:

CF: What benefits does Cloudera expect the enterprise market to reap by adopting this new platform? A real-world example or two would be helpful.

JT: As a consumer, you expect your phone company to notify you when you are about to be charged extra for data, roaming, minutes, etc. Imagine flying from the U.S. to the UK and forgetting to turn off roaming. That would result in a huge bill. Think about what it requires of the phone company to be able to send you a warning message about data use.

In the simplest terms, it requires real-time data ingestion, some predictive analytics (are you using more data than you normally would?) and toggling between the security and governance required for data in the U.S. and what’s required in the U.K. (GDPR).

For many companies, this has meant integrating various solutions and then making sure each platform has the right governance and security policies in place. This is why we say that “with the Cloudera Data Platform, IT can embrace hybrid data architectures and set up cloud data lakes with enterprise-grade security and governance in hours instead of days or weeks.”