It can be difficult for a technology company to get its bearings these days. The on-premises-public-cloud teeter-totter has customers going this way one minute and that way the next. Cloudera Inc. is trying to bridge the gap between computing environments while sending a data-centric message to the biggest enterprises on the block.

“It’s going to be a hybrid world for as far out as we can see,” said Mick Hollison (pictured), chief marketing officer of Cloudera.

Hollison spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during theCUBE NYC event in New York. They discussed Cloudera’s refreshed market mission and a number of announcements.

Narrowing things down

For economic or security reasons, companies will want to keep some workloads on-prem, according to Hollison. Others, particularly those heavy on machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, are more “transient” and better suited to public cloud, he added.

“Allowing companies to bridge that gap while maintaining one security, compliance and management model — something we call a shared data experience — is really our core differentiator as a business,” Hollison stated.

In terms of more specific use cases, the company is also going deep in data management and machine learning, which are kind of like love and marriage, according to Hollison; you can’t have the latter without the former.

What has Cloudera done for customers lately? It has helped them “grow, connect and protect,” Hollison said; that has become an official phrase at the company. In a nutshell, it’s helping them grow revenue streams, connect internet of things devices, and protect data.

To further its mission, it’s just released Cloudera Enterprise 6, the biggest release in the history of the company, featuring more than 30 open-source projects. Its data-management platform is sharpening its focus on the end goal of ML. And it’s announcing Cloudera Data Warehouse (and its platform-as-a-service flavor, Altus). These offerings are all optimized for multicloud, Hollison explained.

The company is focused intensely on its base of 5,000 large enterprises; rather than hunting down new customers, it mainly wants to help existing ones expand into new use cases, Hollison concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE NYC event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE