Cloudera sees greater opportunities in Southeast Asia through Tech Data partnership

“One of the things which I'm looking forward to doing with the Tech Data team is to find ways to share resources between markets or at least have virtual teams where we can share best practices,” says Derek Judge, Alliances & Channels Lead, APAC, for Cloudera.

Cloudera’s partnership with Tech Data in Asia Pacific has been ongoing for some time. While the data management vendor has got a strong partner network in the region, its relationship with Tech Data is built on the engagement and strong collaboration they have with customers.

CRN Asia caught up with Derek Judge, Alliances & Channels Lead, APAC, for Cloudera as well as Lynn Toh, Senior Director, Advanced Solutions for Tech Data at the Tech Data Mometum Summit in Singapore a few weeks ago to understand more about their partnership as well as how Cloudera is working with other partners in the region.

What’s most exciting for Cloudera in the region currently?

Derek: At the moment we see a lot of interest in data and AI. As customers are moving into the AI space, they soon realize that actually it's very hard to move into a proper sort of enterprise AI motion unless they have really strong data to underpin it.

We're also finding that a lot of customers like our data platform and also our AI platform because we can work on-prem and in the cloud. We have this hybrid model and we're finding again a lot of customers who, for reasons of size or security, have got a lot of data on-prem. It's very hard to find an AI solution which can work on cloud and on-prem, and so particularly in this region where we have, for example, banks, healthcare, and these kinds of industries where there's still a need for on-prem data.

And this is where partners come in to drive the conversations for Cloudera?

Derek: With partners, it's kind of the canary in the coal mine. Sometimes it's the partners that will come to us first. We hear the noises first from the partners when there's kind of a change in the market. In fact, it was with Tech Data that one of our major global SIs wanted to arrange a meeting with us.

We’ve had a few years relationship directly with this SI, but they had to come and find us because that relationship had kind of gone away, and they came to us and actually came through Tech Data. Tech Data gives us this kind of sounding board with a lot of the community, and it helps us to have that sort of level of engagement.

And there are signs we're hearing from partners around the region. I think we've got an uptick in terms of inbound interest in what we do. We're seeing that across all markets, actually especially with the nature of the solutions that people are coming to us for, which varies slightly from market to market.

So, for example, in some markets, there's some appliances that are dated and kind of reached their end of life. And for some of these companies, they're much more comfortable moving to Cloudera because we can provide something which is a natural evolution off the appliances onto a data platform that's AI ready. And that's another area where we see a lot of interest.

The beauty of what Cloudera does with AI is that we productionize AI models. We came from the big data space where there were loads of open source projects. And what Cloudera did was to bring them all together and make them production ready. In effect, what we're doing is we're extending that into the AI space in the same way that Cloudera helped customers navigate the whole idea of having a single version of the truth.

Coming back to partner, we're seeing a lot of interest around industry-based solutions and managed service style partners. And I think the reason for that is the on-prem cost model. So that's either going to be through standardizing configurations or whatever is needed for standard use cases. We're also seeing partners squeezing the costs out by doing more of a sort of managed service model.

There are also partners coming back to the big data space who are the type of partner that is great at standardizing and squeezing costs down on on-prem. And if that happens, we're going to give more choice to the customer.

How is Cloudera helping partners drive help customers in their data and AI journey then?

Derek: We have a really strong partner network, which provides a portal for self-learning. We've got all sorts of good self-learning materials there, and some accreditations and so on. And that's actually very strong. We have a partner SE team as well, who are dedicated to enabling and supporting our partners technically.

As Tech Data has a center of excellence (CoE) that runs Cloudera, it provides the ability to help our reseller partners and the partners facing the customers to help them to do accurate sizing. With the COE, there's a platform for them to use and do demos on. Tech Data also helps provide regular updates to the partner community.

While we do have resources to do a lot of that kind of stuff ourselves, we find in the Southeast Asian market, it's very hard for us to touch all of those partners. For example, there are partners that are smaller and have more industry focused kind of solutions that just make them repeatable and simple. It's much better for us to work with Tech Data because we don't deal with the hardware stack and the tech verification.

One of the things which I'm looking forward to doing with the Tech Data team is to find ways to share resources between markets or at least have virtual teams where we can share best practices. I am also hoping there may be opportunities for us to do initiatives together where we share resources like CoE resources.

For Tech Data, what else is expected from Cloudera in the partnership moving forward?

Lynn: As a distributor, we get to see what the vendor is doing and put it onto the partners so that the partners can generate business outcomes. And to Derek's point, how we can work closer together, now that we have our CoE, we will try to see how to leverage on each other more to be more efficient.

Once we leverage on each other more, we can bring more valuable outcomes to each of the countries, and definitely to the vendors and the partners for sure. The big thing about data, this just keeps coming out in all our conversations with partners, is data on its own has no value.

What we can see more from Cloudera is how to reintegrate Cloudera solutions into whatever we have. So, for example, during Momentum 2025, it's actually a showcase of AI use cases. And Cloudera is carving the path on AI and data. But what about the infrastructure? How about networking and security?

That's where we can come in. If we could derive a plan to work together in terms of an end-to-end solution, it can increase the stickiness that we have with Cloudera as well as with the partners.

At the end of the day, we will be the one that's offering a one-stop shop, a simple form of solutioning to them. And it will be more hassle-free for them to work with us.