Cloudera Inc. has made recent moves landing it prominently in the news. While that has justifiably captured the interest of shareholders and Wall Street, perhaps more significant is the technological direction of the company going forward.

Cloudera occupies an important place in the enterprise data cloud platform space, with 1,800 customers and quarterly sales of $224 million based on the last financial reporting. The company is being taken private, which will remove Wall Street from the equation for now, and two recent acquisitions offer promise toward a business model focused on opening new market opportunities in the world of software as a service and operational automation.

The question on the table for Cloudera will be how its offerings can provide much-desired data-driven insight in a crowded space occupied by the hyperscalers and high-profile firms such as Snowflake Inc. and Databricks Inc.

“Can they acquire new customers in a landscape that’s a lot more diverse?” asked Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight LLC, in an interview with theCUBE. “The early signs are good, but the ultimate success will be whether Cloudera can grow its market.”

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 and Cloudera are co-hosting the “Transform Innovative Ideas Into Data-Driven Insights” event starting at 9 a.m. PDT on August 5. 

Event speakers will include Mick Hollison, president at 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.)

Recent acquisitions

At the core of the company’s value proposition is Cloudera Data Platform, or CDP, which was introduced in 2019. The launch was the culmination of Cloudera’s merger with Hadoop-focused Hortonworks Inc., solidifying the firm’s multi and hybrid cloud expertise.

With the addition in June of Datacoral Inc. and Cazena Inc., Cloudera is positioning itself as more than a data platform by offering an end-to-end, low-code or no-code experience to a wide range of business audiences.

“They are going to try and provide the same experience as any cloud provider would, but on any cloud,” Baer noted.

Core tenants for data

Extending the Cloudera Data Platform to encompass the full cloud experience was a work in progress well before the headline-making events of June. In September, the company added a new set of engineering and analytics tools to its CDP offering.

That was followed by an agreement announced earlier this year that customers using Dell EMC PowerScale with Cloudera DataHub or Hortonworks Data Platform will benefit from extended support and optimized storage strategies.

“With Cloud Data Platform, what we have done is taken the core tenants around data lakes – multifunctionality, stewardship, management – and added cloud-native capabilities to it,” said Ram Venkatesh, vice president of engineering at Cloudera, during an interview with theCUBE in December. “I’m talking about things like disaggregated storage and compute, being able to not only take advantage of Hadoop Distributed File System, but also at a deep fundamental level, cloud storage.”

CEO at the center

A common thread through Cloudera’s journey over the past two years has been Rob Bearden, the firm’s current CEO. Bearden, a well-known executive in the open-source community, led Hortonworks for nearly a decade, brought JBoss and SpringSource to successful acquisitions by Red Hat Inc. and VMware Inc., respectively, and stepped in briefly to lead Docker Inc. through the sale of its enterprise business.

When Bearden was first interviewed on theCUBE during Hadoop Summit 2012, the Hortonworks co-founder spoke about the importance of taking the company’s technology and making it enterprise-ready at scale. In an interview six years later, prior to his company’s merger with Cloudera, Bearden sounded many of the same notes when assessing the enterprise cloud landscape.

“It’s about the entire lifecycle of the data and bringing all data under management,” Bearden said. “It’s being able to give the enterprise that accessibility to data across each tier – on-prem, private cloud, and across all the multiclouds. And it’s a hybrid architecture world now.”

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