Gone are the days when data was used for one purpose and then stored and forgotten about. Today data is all about making money. And that means the process of data warehousing has been disrupted as it deals with the demands of large-scale, high-speed, modern application deployment.

“It’s complicated. It’s not ‘I’m going to move my data platform that I used to run from here to there.’ It’s about ‘I’ve got this use case, and I’ve got to stand it up in six weeks in the middle of the pandemic, and how do I go do that?’” said Ram Venkatesh (pictured), vice president of engineering at Cloudera Inc.

Venkatesh spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how the Cloudera Data Platform and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud storage combine to provide customers with the ability to gain insights and monetize data assets wherever they are stored. (* Disclosure below.)

More ways to monetize data assets

A few years ago, Venkatesh was advising customers on operating infrastructure. Now the conversation is about deriving value from the data sets they already have.

“It’s this drive towards monetizing data that’s driving new use cases on the platform,” Venkatesh said.

Those use cases involve combining data from different sources — structured, semi-structured, transactional, non-transactional, event-oriented, messaging — and identifying ways to monetize it that were unthought of when the data was originally stored.

Customers who hold data hackathons to answer new questions with existing data “is a kind of use case that’s hard to enable unless you have a homogenous, really cohesive view of all of your data,” Venkatesh said.

Providing these use cases with the security, governance, compliance and self-service data access they require is the shared data experience that’s central to the Cloudera Data Platform.

AWS and CDP create a layer cake of customer benefits

CDP was first launched on AWS, and the close partnership benefits customers in four ways, according to Venkatesh. The base is made from the core infrastructure services of storage and compute. Topping that is the combination of AWS services and the analytics layer in Cloudera Data Warehouse offering, which “makes sure we have a very strong level of interop at the analytics layer,” Venkatesh added.

The third layer in the partnership cake is the ability to provide ease of consumption for analysis. And on the top is the ability to share data, with data assets open to search and browse regardless of location.

“Customers want to make sure that the data estates they have on different clouds can interoperate,” Venkatesh said. 

The “vertical slice” running through all four layers is the “very strong” business relationship between AWS and Cloudera, he explained.

“It’s a complex deployment to deploy a large multifunction data analytics estate,” Venakesh stated. “We navigate this jointly with AWS to make sure, from a best practices standpoint, that we are very well aligned and, from a cost standpoint, what we are telling the customer architecturally is very well aligned.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Cloudera Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cloudera, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE