Cloudera's Derek Judge
Enterprise data cloud platform provider Cloudera has launched its new Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Private Cloud, built for hybrid cloud environments and aimed at giving companies the ability to connect their on-premises private clouds to public clouds with consistent, built-in security and governance.
The CDP Private Cloud is supported by Red Hat OpenShift, which, in Cloudera's own words "completes the vision of an enterprise data cloud with a hybrid architecture, powered by Kubernetes, that separates compute and storage for greater agility, ease of use and more efficient use of private and public cloud infrastructure". It is currently in tech preview for select customers and is expected to be generally available in Cloudera’s third quarter of 2020.
Cloudera APAC head of channel and alliances Derek Judge said there was a huge services opportunity on the table for partners and across A/NZ the company has a strong partner network. Within Australia, Cloudera maintains about 66 partners and a further 15 within New Zealand including companies such as Accenture, DXC and NTT.
“Rather than doing point projects, customers need a lot of help to understand how they can operate the environment across the cloud in private or public, or a hybrid of these two, what do they choose? They need guidance from partners to decide, and also within the data lifecycle, where should it go? How can you make it more efficient? There’s a great service opportunity for partners there,” Judge said.
“Some of these partners are part of our global network and active in the A/NZ region, others are strong local players. So we don’t see counting partners in absolute terms as an exact science.”
The Cloudera Connect partner program, which was relaunched last year, features a partner portal with enablement materials -- including the new Cloudera Market Builders. The program features Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers.
“Enablement, support, mentoring, making sure we’re going to shoulder-to-shoulder in the sales cycle and establishing an element of trust with our partners is what partners appreciate,” Judge said.
“If the customer’s data isn’t all on the cloud or on-premises - then where it is? This is right at the heart of what we’re doing with CDP, and it’s also a services opportunity for our partners.”
Cloudera A/NZ country manager, Nick Hoskins added there was a significant market interest in its private cloud technology in Australia and New Zealand, particularly within regulated industries with strict security requirements such as banking and government sectors, as well as telecommunications, retail, mining and resources.
“They’re heavily regulated, very security conscious organisations and they tend to house the biggest data repositories in any market, and not surprisingly they’re big markets for us in Australia as well,” he said. “We deal with some of the largest government departments in Australia and New Zealand, and we are also fortunate to have the largest banks and telcos as our customers. The problems we seek to solve, are very prevalent in the biggest organisations.
“CDP Private Cloud gives us, our partners and customers, an opportunity to push the boundaries further, leveraging the benefits of private cloud technology to deliver even greater data and business agility."
Hoskins said it was completely focused on bringing in cloud-native services that can completely manage the entire data lifecycle in any cloud or data centre.
“That’s a really big statement of openness. We’ve got a capability that supports the full data lifecycle and we will give customers the ability to run their data lifecycle and leverage the Cloudera platform without boundaries in respect to where they run it - in different types of cloud or on-premises," he said.
"The biggest challenge that data driven organisations encounter is the fact that with many data silos across the organisation, there’s an inherent level of complexity of tapping into and bringing all that data together so we can leverage it in a more meaningful way to drive actionable insights.”
