Cloudera’s Expanding Presence in India: Unlocking the Potential of a Thriving Market

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Remus Lim, Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Cloudera

Can you share details of Cloudera’s business presence in India, and how important is India as a market for Cloudera?

In India, Cloudera operates from three strategically located offices in Bangalore, Chennai, and Mumbai. The Bangalore office was established in 2022 as a center of excellence (CoE) and currently has a workforce of 500 talented engineers and developers. The center plays a significant role in the development of Cloudera’s core technologies and contributes to the development of Cloudera’s next-generation data management and analytics platform, the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP).

In addition to this, Cloudera has some significant customers in India, helping them leverage the hybrid cloud for their business success by deploying their hybrid data platform, CDP. For instance, Axis Bank utilized Cloudera’s platform across various domains, including toll gate optimization, money laundering detection, customized offers, and risk management. By leveraging Cloudera’s solutions, Axis Bank was able to efficiently handle and examine a larger volume of data, resulting in enhanced customer insights and tailored experiences.

India’s growing economy, increasing digitization, and rapid adoption of technology make it an important market for Cloudera. With several technological advancements, enterprises generate massive amounts of data that require efficient management, processing, and analysis, which increases the need for a better data management platform. Additionally, the Indian government’s initiatives such as Digital India, Smart Cities Mission, and the push for data-driven decision-making have further accelerated the demand for advanced data analytics and big data solutions. Cloudera’s expertise in these areas positions the company well to cater to the needs of Indian enterprises.

The adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud environments can present several challenges. How is Cloudera addressing these challenges with its Open Data Lakehouse and how is it enabling hybrid and multi-cloud deployments?

Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are the new de facto standard with enterprise data stored both on-premises and potentially across multiple public clouds, making it difficult to manage cloud consumption across various departments and cost centers, keep the platform stable and controlled, and troubleshoot issues across different infrastructures.

To address this challenge, Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) delivers the world’s only open data lakehouse that helps organizations run quick analytics on all data – structured and unstructured at a massive scale. It is vendor-agnostic which eliminates data silos and allows data teams to collaborate on the same data with the tools of their choice on any public cloud and private cloud, throughout the entire data life cycle. In this way, it makes all of an enterprise’s data AI-ready, regardless of where the data resides.

With its open source platform, Cloudera is helping Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), India’s leading exchange group, to centralize their structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and shorten the time taken for analysis and reporting. BSE used Cloudera’s platform to set up their application and scaled up operations to create a secure trading enterprise data environment. The solution also allowed them to respond to transactional queries at a warp speed of six microseconds from when orders hit the exchange gateway. Similarly, Yes Bank uses these solutions to achieve speed, agility, flexibility, and storage capacity to process their unstructured data and run real-time analytics with heightening data security. Empowered by the accessibility and agency over its data, YES BANK has brought a previously out-sourced customer loyalty program in-house, which has saved them a quarter of a million dollars every year.

You recently announced that Cloudera Observability is made available for all customers using Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) on public or private cloud environments. How will this help organizations in managing workloads on cloud?

Recently available on CDP, Cloudera Observability enables enterprises to analyze the past, observe the present, and optimize the future. Building on Cloudera’s years of experience in product engineering, and professional services, the single pane of glass solution empowers users to monitor, understand, and optimize their CDP deployments with ease and confidence.

Additionally, it acts as a key ingredient to unlock value from an open data lakehouse and gives customers unprecedented visibility into workload and resource utilization allowing them to better control and manage budget overruns and improve performance.

What is Cloudera’s vision for the future of AI? How does the company prioritize providing trusted, secure, and responsible AI-based applications in its roadmap?

Cloudera visions all enterprises to benefit from secure, trusted, and responsible AI at scale. With its open data lakehouse architecture, Cloudera brings together the capabilities of a data warehouse and a data lake to power business intelligence, AI, and machine learning (ML) solutions.

For AI to be successful it needs to be trusted. And trusting AI starts with trusting the data. Cloudera’s offering helps businesses unlock the value of data, irrespective of its location thus building trust in the data. In addition to this, the company enables data to be AI-ready for enterprises to benefit from current and future developments in AI.

Can you highlight some of the key innovations or technologies that Cloudera has introduced to advance AI adoption? How do these innovations address the challenges faced by enterprises in adopting AI?

The key innovation of Cloudera is its flagship product, Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) combines analytics, data engineering, and machine learning capabilities to provide a unified environment for managing and analyzing data, making it easier for enterprises to leverage AI technologies. It also offers a secure and governed infrastructure to support AI workloads. In addition to this, the other innovation that advances AI adoption as a feature of CDP is the Shared Data Experience (SDX) that ensures data privacy, compliance, and auditability, which are critical factors for enterprises adopting AI. SDX allows organizations to share data and collaborate while maintaining control and data governance.

These innovations allow organizations to democratize AI as these provide self-service capabilities, facilitate collaboration among data scientists and developers by offering shared workspaces that streamline the end-to-end AI development process, and offer scalability to handle growing data volumes and increasing AI workloads.

The democratization of AI is a significant trend in the industry. How is Cloudera contributing to the democratization of AI, and how does it empower developers and lines of business across industries to unlock the full potential of AI?

With technology advancing at a rapid pace and its easy availability, every individual can readily access it for their own benefit, and so is the case for AI. The publicly available AI services may be appealing, but companies require the ability to create interactive experiences using their own data, ensuring privacy and confidentiality. Cloudera’s new Large Language Model (LLM) Chatbot Augmented with Enterprise Data offers a framework for implementing generative AI using large language models within organizations. It helps businesses develop their own AI applications by utilizing an open-source LLM of their choice, leveraging their internal data infrastructure.

For instance, the second largest financial services group in Southeast Asia, OCBC Bank, recently onboarded Cloudera to integrate AI at scale throughout the organization and drive more customer innovation and operational efficiency. This helped the bank to increase its revenue by analyzing real-time contextual data from customer conversations related to sales, service and more. Therefore, Cloudera’s offering not only empowers data scientists and ML teams but also all developers and lines of business within the enterprise, enabling true democratization of AI.