Cloudera Leaves Hadoop for the Cloud
Company’s cloud-based platform delivers analytics-as-a-service
Cloudera continues to pivot away from its Hadoop roots with a new cloud-based data management platform that can deliver data analytics as a service.
The Lowdown: The launch this week of the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) at the O’Reilly Strata Data Market marks another step in the company’s evolution at a time when demand for Hadoop continues to decline.
The Details: The CDP enables enterprise IT departments and channel partners to deliver analytics-as-a-service to end users in multicloud and hybrid cloud environments as well on in private clouds on premises. It includes self-service capabilities around data engineering, data warehouses, operational databases, machine learning, and data flow and streaming. The open-source platform uses shared data experience (SDX) capabilities to quickly spin up secure data lakes, simplifying security and compliance for organizations.
Included in CDP are three cloud services:
> Cloudera Data Warehouse: For fast and easy deployment of data warehouses for teams of business analysts.
> Cloudera Machine Learning: To quickly create collaborative machine learning workspaces for data scientists.
> Cloudera Data Hub: To enable IT staffs and developers to build custom applications.
The services are available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while an on-premises software version – CDP Data Center – is available now to select customers in tech, with general availability coming later this year.
The Impact: Hadoop was a key open-source analytics technology as the Big Data era got underway, but demand for the technology has tanked in recent years as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other major public cloud providers have built out services that enable enterprises to manage and analyze the massive amounts of data they are generating. Cloudera is hoping to bring its customers and partners along on its push into the cloud.
Background: The big players in commercializing Hadoop over the past several years have been hit hard by the rapid changes and have tried to adapt. Cloudera in January closed its $5.2 billion merger with Hortonworks, hoping that the combined company would be big and strong enough to compete with the cloud players. Another Hadoop pioneer, MapR, earlier this year warned that it would close down within weeks if it couldn’t get more funding or find a buyer. In August, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise bought MapR for an undisclosed amount.
The Buzz: “With Cloudera Data Platform, IT can embrace hybrid data architectures and set up cloud data lakes with enterprise-grade security and governance in hours instead of days or weeks,” said Arun C. Murthy, chief product officer at Cloudera. “Business users get cloud-native, easy-to-use multifunction analytics satisfying their need for speed and agility.”
“While enterprises are rapidly adopting data platform technologies and are eager to explore the cloud for driving analytical workloads, many face challenges in trying to leverage all of their data to achieve better business outcomes,” said James Curtis, senior analyst for the data, AI and analytics channel at 451 Research. “Solutions such as the forthcoming Cloudera Data Platform help enterprises navigate complex data processes across multiple clouds, manage data governance, and enable multifunction analytics, regardless of where the data resides.”
“Our clients look for solutions that allow them to harness the power of data by shifting data and associated workloads between multiple cloud providers, as well as blending on-premise data,” said Sanjeev Vohra, group technology officer and global data business lead at Accenture Technology. “The Cloudera Data Platform offers an open and scalable enterprise data approach that provides flexibility from both a technical and financial perspective. This can help our clients create transformational outcomes by providing useful and efficient data, as well as alignment between their cloud and enterprise data strategies.”
“Every enterprise client of ours is on a journey to AI. But there is no AI without IA (information architecture), which starts with how you manage the lifecycle of your data,” said Rob Thomas, general manager of data and AI at IBM. “A hybrid multicloud environment is one in which you build once and run from anywhere within your enterprise, and the combination of Cloudera Data Platform and IBM Cloud Pak for Data can deliver a complete answer/solution/information architecture. IBM and Cloudera are positioned to help customers from organizing to governing to deriving analytics, together with Cloudera our aim is to help customers through their entire AI journey.”