Cloudera Doubling Down On Innovation, Cloud Transformation As Private Company

Cloudera President Mick Hollison said the company’s efforts to bring smaller enterprises onto its platform will give it and its partners ‘a bigger lake to go fishing’ in.

With its move to go private last fall in a $5.3 billion deal with private equity firms, cloud data company Cloudera is getting the capital and the flexibility to dive deeper with its big data strategy, and it plans to bring partners along for the ride.

“It’s pretty darn straightforward. It’s about having the flexibility and resources that we needed to double down on our innovation, on our transformation to the cloud, and on really acquiring new customers,” said Mick Hollison, president of Cloudera, Santa Clara, Calif., in an interview with CRNtv.

Cloudera will lean on its partners to grow that customer base, especially as it looks to migrate its customers to the Cloudera Data Platform.

“We’re going to make everything about our platform easier, more approachable, easier for a line-of-business analyst to use in addition to IT personnel. That’s going to expand our remit and our opportunity into the Fortune 5000. So, as we expand our own customer, kind of go down market just a little bit from where we are today, still focused on the enterprise, but larger, smaller enterprises in some instances, and that’s going to give us and our partners a bigger space, a bigger lake to go fishing,” said Hollison.

Cloudera’s big data strategy captures a key market trend: the value of multi-cloud, which is said to enable a combination of security and cost savings. Traditionally, customers subject to strict regulations around data security and privacy were limited to an on-premises architecture. But a solution like Cloudera’s Data Platform changes that as it breaks down cloud workload and data silos.

“And what I can tell you is that the business partners that have gotten on board with us here have all seen this. They’re all beginning to develop hybrid offerings of their own. So even the big hyperscale cloud vendors are seeing this opportunity. So we see it as a big bet and one that we feel really confident in, and that will yield great returns for our partners.”

Partners like TD Synnex: “Our mission is to bring our customers through a data journey, a data maturity journey. And that data maturity journey starts at the foundation of just collecting information. And then you’re going all the way through to modernizing that data to being able to derive insights from that data and then finally become a data driven organization. And I bring that up because every client wants to become a data driven organization. But it’s hard. It’s not easy to bring disparate data from all over the organization, bring it together so that you can derive insights and become a data driven organization. And what’s neat about Cloudera’s technology,” said Clay Davis, vice president of global analytics and IoT at TD Synnex.

For more coverage on Cloudera and how it’s working with partners to reach its goals, stay tuned to CRNtv.