Big names have marked the history of Cloudera Inc. since its beginning in 2008. Its co-founders came from Google LLC, Yahoo and Facebook Inc. The firm rose to prominence through its association with the influential Hadoop ecosystem, leading to a merger with Hortonworks Inc. in 2019.

In June, Cloudera announced that well-known private equity firms KKR and CD&R would take it private, led by its largest shareholder – Carl Icahn’s Icahn Group – in a deal valued at $5.3 billion.

That a succession of major industry figures, companies and technologies would become associated with Cloudera over the past decade should come as no surprise. Services for hybrid or multicloud environments have become critical for IT operations in most global businesses, and a rapid path to insight has become essential.

“Speed is everything in a hyper-competitive climate,” said Dave Vellante, co-founder and chief research officer at Wikibon and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “The faster we get insights from data and get data products to market, the faster we grow and the more competitive we become.”

Industry experts from manufacturing, retail and the public sector will join executives from Cloudera, Nvidia, Accenture and Forrester Research for an in-depth look at leveraging data for accelerated velocity and the challenges facing enterprises today. TheCUBE’s coverage of the event, which is titled  “Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights,” begins at 9 a.m. PDT on August 5. 

Event speakers will include Mick Hollison, president of Cloudera; Rob Bearden, chief executive officer at Cloudera; Manuvir Das, head of enterprise computing at Nvidia; Michele Goetz, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research; and Drew Allan, managing director at Accenture. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch Dave Vellante in the video below as he lays out what to expect from the upcoming Cloudera “Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights” event:

Investment in enterprise data cloud

The decision to take Cloudera private follows a trend becoming more apparent in the technology world over the past six months. Private equity money is gushing into tech firms at the moment, and seven of the 12 largest tech acquisitions in the U.S. to date for 2021 have been fueled by private equity groups.

Some analysts have attributed the movement of private equity into tech as interest in the software sector because of its strong margins and relatively stable customer base. Cloudera offers a private investment opportunity in a market that has seen market players Snowflake Inc. launch the largest software IPO in history and Databricks Inc. line up for its own public offering potentially later this year.

Cloudera’s recent news has once again focused the spotlight on its role in delivering an enterprise data cloud, with AI and edge computing support. The company has focused in recent years on tailoring its Cloudera Data Platform for data management in multicloud and hybrid cloud enterprise environments as an alternative to services offered by the major cloud providers. 

“What the third parties like Cloudera are saying is: ‘We are the only ones who can give you that same experience across any cloud,” said Tony Baer, principal at dbinsight LLC, in an interview with theCUBE. “It’s not unprecedented for third parties to offer these kinds of experiences.”

New era of self-service

A few clues to Cloudera’s strategic direction going forward can be seen in two acquisitions disclosed on the same day as the private equity announcement. Cloudera acquired two software-as-a-service firms – Datacoral Inc. and Cazena Inc. – in a bid to move its business closer to a platform that provides self-service, end-to-end capabilities.

Datacoral offers a fully managed service that enables rapid data conversion and a multi-tenant architecture with no-code connectors. Cazena provides Instant Cloud Data Lakes that will facilitate migration to Cloudera’s platform.

Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden confirmed the rationale behind the purchase of the two SaaS-driven businesses in a statement released last month.

“The acquisitions will enable Cloudera to usher in a new era of low-code, no-code self-service by automating complex operations – enabling our customers to focus on getting value from their data rather than configuring, operating and managing the underlying infrastructure,” Bearden said.

Loyal customer base

Ultimately, Cloudera’s path forward will likely be linked to enterprise interest in a hybrid computing model with a key focus on easier deployment of analytics. Prior to June’s acquisition news, the company announced a collaboration with Nvidia Inc. to integrate its Cloudera Data Platform with Nvidia’s Accelerated Spark 3.0 libraries. This will allow the addition of machine learning to processes without having to rework GPUs.

Earlier this year, Cloudera also released SQL Stream Builder, a tool that provides a common framework to process streaming data when employing Apache Flink, Kafka Streams or Spark Structured Streaming engines. Data analysts can now query information in Cloudera Data Flow without having to write code.

With its open-source roots in Hadoop and the previous merger with Hortonworks, Cloudera is operating from a solid customer ecosystem that will serve it well going forward. Its challenge will be to introduce new solutions and services to fuel new growth.

“The Hadoop/Hortonworks market has proven to be pretty loyal; they’ve done a good job of retaining their customer base,” Baer noted. “Cloudera has not told me this, but where I expect them to go next is to do something like SAP has done and provide an integrated visualization capability in its data warehouse.”

Livestream of Cloudera’s ‘Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights’ event

Cloudera’s “Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights” event is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here on demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of Cloudera’s “Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights” event, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during Cloudera’s “Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights” include Cloudera’s Mick Hollison, president; Cindy Maike, vice president of industry solutions and value management; and Nasheb Ismaily, senior cloud and data engineer.

TheCUBE will also speak with Michael Ger, managing director of manufacturing and automotive, and Rick Taylor, systems engineer at Cloudera, as well as Drew Allan, managing director at Accenture PLC. Visit the event website for a complete list of speakers.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Cloudera “Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights” event. Neither Cloudera Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE