Cloudera’s flagship user conference EVOLVE25 kicked off in Singapore with CEO Charles Sansbury highlighting how the organisation is “growing profitable, making meaningful investments in the product set, both through internal R&D, as well as through mergers and acquisitions.”
He detailed how Cloudera had collectively spent over USD300million in making the product better over the last 12 months, and how the business will “continue to make those investments.”
Charles also emphasised that the conference’s content is shifting from a technology platform focus to being business use case-driven. He said, “We want this to be customer-driven. So a lot of the content you’ll see will be customers of Cloudera talking about how they’ve included the technology, the benefits they’ve gotten.”
He further explained, “One of the things we’ve seen recently in the last quarter to 18 months, is really a change from a technology platform discussion to a business use case discussion, primarily driven by the emergence and the accelerating emergence of AI.”
Cloud anywhere
It turns out AI is going to be big, and Cloudera’s C-suite echoed this during their keynotes.
However, it is not just about AI.
“We want this to be customer-driven. So a lot of the content you’ll see will be customers of Cloudera talking about how they’ve included the technology, the benefits they’ve gotten.”
Charles Sansbury
Cloudera’s technology direction this year builds upon ideas introduced last year – cloud anywhere, the right workload on the right platform, data management and governance for the entire data state, and AI/ML applications that are developed while wrapped within security and scalability frameworks.
One of the keys to making “cloud anywhere” happen is Cloudera’s recent acquisition of Taikun.
Frank O’Dowd, Chief Revenue Officer described Taikun as being able to deliver, “light speed improvements” when it comes to data services working independently of platform, use of the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) and the ability to do single or multi-cluster large workloads.
AI agents in the on-premise and cloud era
During keynotes, the CPO and CTO, Leo Brunnick and Sergio Gago respectively, presented an amusing narration of how two previous big data analytics eras are converging into a single one and enabling technologies like AI agents.
Sergio explained, “What are the two things you need to build AI agents? One is proper access to all your data. And second is True LLMs (large language models) that you can control, so that you can control your own destiny… what we call Private AI.”
“So, if you have proper data federation and you have proper data gravity of your systems, maybe those are all the ingredients you need to create real agentic systems that are enterprise grade.”
His presentation went on to describe that companies can create various AI agents – such as those analysing historical sales, forecasting with machine learning, and generating reports – to serve different business needs.
What are the two things you need to build AI agents? One is proper access to all your data. And second is True LLMs (large language models) that you can control, so that you can control your own destiny… what we call Private AI.
Sergio Gago
As ”new digital colleagues”, these agents must be fast, scalable, secure, and customisable, working with local data and infrastructure. But, Sergio observed that most companies get stuck at POCs or the proof-of-concept stage. “It’s really cool to show an agent doing something, but then… how do you really take that to your customers?”
The real challenge is moving beyond simple demos to fully integrating these agents into enterprise systems, ensuring observability, control, and data lineage. Cloudera’s AI Studio is designed to help organisations train data, use models, and “give your companies agents to succeed in the future.”
Yet another way to get AI up and running in an organisation is with AI Express, an out-of-the-box agentic AI application on any data, that can be deployed in a matter of weeks without any use case dependencies. According to Frank, “We already have multiple customers using this in the early adopter phase.”
Overall, the chief revenue officer stated that Cloudera has over 250 customers leveraging its platform for AI around the world. “We expect that number to more than double within the next 12 months.”
