Cloudera unveils hybrid cloud & AI platform updates

Cloudera has announced key updates to its platform and partnerships, focusing on hybrid cloud capabilities and enterprise AI ecosystems, aiming to enhance data analytics and AI deployment for organisations globally.

The updates were revealed during Cloudera's EVOLVE24 New York event, where the company introduced new features to bolster its hybrid cloud offerings. The next platform release will provide a unified platform with a single codebase for infrastructures, ensuring consistent functionality whether data resides on-premises or in the cloud. This development promises enhanced flexibility and adaptability for enterprise data needs.

Keir Garrett, Regional Vice President of Cloudera Australia and New Zealand, highlights the importance of this approach for Australian organisations. "For Australian organisations, despite having robust hybrid or multi-cloud strategies, they face challenges with bringing analytics and GenAI models to their data wherever it lives. This situation restricts their freedom of choice with an increased tendency of vendor lock-ins that hinder innovation. Cloudera's true hybrid platform addresses these issues by providing consistent functionality, simplifying IT management and offering greater freedom in deploying data and analytics based on evolving business needs. This approach not only streamlines operations but also prepares organisations for future demands in data, analytics and AI, ensuring they remain competitive and adaptable in an increasingly hybrid world."

Andrew Brust, Industry Analyst at Blue Badge Insights, emphasised the need for a 'true' hybrid cloud approach. "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."

In related announcements, Cloudera has expanded its Enterprise AI Ecosystem to include new partners such as Anthropic, Google Cloud, and Snowflake. This expansion aims to provide more comprehensive AI solutions by integrating with significant AI technologies, ensuring enterprises can safely and economically maximise their AI initiatives.

Abhas Ricky, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudera, explained the initiative's impact. "We pioneered the Enterprise AI Ecosystem to cater to the complex and continually evolving enterprise-grade security, privacy, authorisation, and LLM demands of major organisations; this involves a complete suite of solutions across accelerated compute, semantic querying, vector embeddings, multi-modal agents, RAG applications, fine-tuning, and frontier models. AI researchers and practitioners have since deployed 400+ cutting-edge AI accelerators (AMPs) and numerous agentic applications supporting high-value use cases such as voice of customer analysis, invoice reconciliation, and underwriting automation. Together we are delivering a fully integrated Enterprise AI platform, built on leading models and knowledge bases, to further production-ready high fidelity solutions delivered with experts by your side."

OCBC Bank is one of the organisations benefiting from Cloudera's AI ecosystem. "OCBC has delivered dozens of Gen AI applications into production leveraging Cloudera AI and technologies from The Enterprise AI Ecosystem members," said Adrien Chenailler, Head of Data Science and AI at OCBC Bank. "Our call centre transcription application transcribes thousands of hours of calls daily and has led to a significant reduction in average call handling time. We have reduced the investment in research time of our Relationship Managers with GenAI. We're delighted that Cloudera continues to expand their Enterprise AI Ecosystem because it delivers proven solution architectures that get us from prototype to production faster."

Cloudera's ongoing developments and partnerships underscore its commitment to evolving with the growing demands for hybrid cloud and AI solutions. Dipto Chakravarty, Chief Product Officer at Cloudera, remarks, "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."