The big-data company Cloudera Inc. is making it easier for enterprises to shift data analytics to the cloud with the launch of a new software-as-a-service-based data lakehouse offering, called Cloudera Data Platform One.

Announced today, CDP One is designed to enable rapid, self-service analytics and exploratory data science on any kind of data, in the cloud. It comes with built-in, enterprise-grade security and machine learning capabilities to enable secure, advanced analytics workloads. Most important, there’s no need for customers to devote time, staff or money on deploying, running and monitoring the platform, since that’s all taken care of by Cloudera.

The new SaaS offering is based on Cloudera’s flagship CDP platform, which is a product suite that encompasses various data management and analytics tools. CDP is popular with enterprises since it allows them to collect business records from their internal systems, centralize them in a single data lake, and from there analyze everything to obtain business insights.

The data can also be used to train machine learning models. To aid with that, Cloudera CDP also comes with various tools for preparing data to get it ready for such projects.

Cloudera said CDP One is designed to appeal to thousands of enterprises that continue to run their analytics and data workloads inside their on-premises data centers. It cites recent research by Ventana Research that shows almost three-quarters of organizations are still avoiding moving such workloads to the cloud, due to regulatory concerns and a lack of cloud skills and resources.

Because it’s a SaaS offering, CDP One makes it much easier for companies to shift their data analysis workloads to the cloud without worrying about such issues. It enables companies to shift data workloads to a more modern, cloud-based architecture rapidly. From there, companies can take advantage of low-code and streaming analytics tools, as well as machine learning models that can perform more customized and sophisticated analysis of data.

As Cloudera Chief Technology Officer Ram Venkatesh explained, many businesses simply don’t have the resources, time and expertise to make such a transformation. Cloudera has suddenly made it possible, he said. “Cloudera’s latest innovation, CDP One, completely alters the equation, shaving months or even years from implementation timelines and providing comprehensive data security,” he said.

The company said Cloudera CDP One is the industry’s first SaaS-based data lakehouse, enabling “zero ops,” meaning customers can simply deploy it and get to work, without worrying about maintenance or security. Cloudera says that results in a reduction in total cost of ownership of between 20% and 35% when compared with “do-it-yourself” cloud solutions.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Doug Henschen told SiliconANGLE that Cloudera CDP One is the result of Cloudera’s acquisition of a company called Cazena Inc. last year. Cazena, he said, specializes in delivering analytics platforms as a service and so it was widely expected that Cloudera would follow up with a native SaaS platform.

“This is an important step for Cloudera if it is to reach a broader market that includes midsized companies and organizations of any size that don’t have deep engineering benches, either by choice of because of the tight competition for available talent,” Henschen said. “Cloudera’s analytical data platform is very powerful and among the most scalable on the planet, but it can be a challenge to deploy and manage. CDP One will make it easier for a wider base of customers to take advantage of Cloudera’s data science, data engineering and SQL/analytical capabilities.”

Gordon Coale, senior director and enterprise architect for data at CWT Global B.V., an early adopter of the platform, heaped praise on the new offering. He explained that the company needed to run a data lakehouse so as to enable more users to run analytics workloads on complex and sensitive data.

However, the company could never do this because it didn’t have the expertise to manage it, nor the ability to hire additional talent. “CDP One was truly the right solution at the right time, rapidly delivering secure and compliant global data science and advanced analytics,” Coale said. “CDP One was ready to accept data in just two days, and some use cases went into production in just four weeks. And we did not need any new staff to make this happen.”

Cloudera said CDP One is available to customers that request it now, with general availability planned for later in the year.

Image: Cloudera