Cloudera & Snowflake partnership to boost hybrid cloud

Cloudera has announced a new partnership with Snowflake and revealed plans to enhance its hybrid cloud platform.

The partnership between Cloudera and Snowflake involves the integration of their respective toolsets to provide an open, unified hybrid data lakehouse using Apache Iceberg. This collaboration aims to offer enterprises a consolidated source of truth for all data, analytics, and AI workloads, according to a joint announcement at EVOLVE24 in New York.

Cloudera's Open Data Lakehouse will extend interoperability to Snowflake, allowing seamless data access through the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog. This integration is designed to streamline operations by eliminating the need for data duplication and transfer. Snowflake users will be able to query data stored on Cloudera's Ozone directly from Snowflake, enhancing data management capabilities across on-premise and cloud environments.

Cloudera's collaboration with Snowflake is expected to reduce the total cost of ownership for enterprises by eliminating data silos and optimising data pipelines. This will help deliver AI and analytics use cases more efficiently. Key benefits include managed Iceberg tables for enhanced data performance, best-of-breed engines for handling data workloads, and unified security and governance measures across the data lifecycle.

Abhas Ricky, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudera, stated: "By extending our open data lakehouse capabilities through Apache Iceberg to Snowflake, we're enabling our customers to not only optimize their data workflows but also unlock new opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and growth. This will help customers simplify their data architecture, minimize data pipelines, and reduce total cost of ownership of their data estate while reducing security risks. Together, Snowflake and Cloudera are bringing about the next era of data-driven decision making for every modern organization."

Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake, commented: "Apache Iceberg is a leading choice for customers who want open standards for data, and Cloudera has been an integral part of the Iceberg project. Our partnership expands what's possible for customers who choose to standardize on Iceberg tables. We are excited to break down silos and deliver a unified hybrid data cloud experience with multi-function analytics to all of our customers."

Alongside this partnership, Cloudera has reiterated its commitment to advancing Iceberg adoption with the announcement of the Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer. This service aims to enhance the performance of Iceberg tables further while reducing operational costs.

Sanjeev Mohan, an analyst at SanjMo, remarked: "Through this collaboration, customers gain access to a unified, robust data management platform that provides a single source of truth for all of their data, whether in the cloud or on-premises. This enables them to streamline and secure their data operations while efficiently analyzing and extracting insights across the entire data lifecycle – from ingestion to AI and analytics. It's a strategic move from two industry giants to partner in a way that will deliver immediate value to businesses."

Furthermore, Cloudera shared its vision for accelerating the hybrid cloud path, showcasing technological advancements and investment strategies at EVOLVE24. The company emphasised the significance of hybrid cloud environments in leveraging an organisation's data footprint, enhancing productivity, and identifying business opportunities.

Cloudera has introduced several enhancements to support its hybrid cloud vision, including a unified platform and hybrid control plane to manage and optimise deployments across various infrastructures. These advancements provide a consistent user experience across cloud and on-premises environments, facilitating the seamless movement of data and workloads.

According to Andrew Brust, Industry Analyst at Blue Badge Insights: "While more businesses have opted to take a hybrid approach to data management, simply adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure is not enough. Meaningful results demand a 'true' hybrid cloud approach to data management, where data and analytics assets running on-premises and in multiple clouds are managed together and federated into a logical whole. True hybrid delivers more than simply deploying to many infrastructures in isolation; it lets data, analytics, and AI move seamlessly between all, to handle change and always be able to deliver insight and value in the most optimum manner. To achieve this, enterprises need a scalable, flexible data architecture that can grow with them. Cloudera is the only vendor on the market that's delivering on this promise of helping enterprises achieve true hybrid at every point along their data management and analytics journeys."

Dipto Chakravarty, Chief Product Officer at Cloudera, added: "As more enterprises prepare for an increasingly hybrid world, they'll need a flexible, scalable, data analytics and AI framework. This marks a pivotal moment for Cloudera as we continue to invest heavily into supporting enterprises on their true hybrid journeys. Change is now. Hybrid is now and we look forward to continuing to build upon the foundation that enables enterprises to thrive every step of the way."