Cloudera unveils Anywhere Cloud to give enterprises greater control over AI deployments

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Charles Sansbury, Cloudera CEO.

Cloudera is giving organizations the much-desired control they want in their AI journey as the data vendor unveiled Cloudera Anywhere Cloud at its Evolve26 Summit in Singapore. Designed to eliminate the infrastructure barriers slowing enterprise AI adoption, Anywhere Cloud establishes a unified control plane that enables enterprises to deploy AI wherever their data already resides.

During the summit, Charles Sansbury, Cloudera CEO, shared that the largest organizations in the world are going to be hybrid in nature when it comes to their data and how they run their workloads and applications. Sansbury explained that this means the data is going to exist all over the organization, and there is going to be a need to have different workflows that have different compute environments.

“What we have built is a platform that will effectively match appropriate workloads to the appropriate compute platform based on frameworks such as performance, security, and cost. The other emerging trend that we've heard from customers is the importance of not just using that enterprise context but being able to sit in a place where it doesn’t leave the trusted security environment. And whether that's private AI or sovereign AI, what we found is the Anywhere Cloud structure is a foundational operating system for this private AI structure,” said Sansbury.

“The cloud changed the way we use technology, and it changed where data lives. AI has increased the importance of using that data well. I think Cloudera with Anywhere Cloud is bringing that cloud operating model and that cloud operating system to your data, wherever it lives, to optimize the business value you get from that unique context,” he added.

Looking at the development of Anywhere Cloud, Sansbury shared that Cloudera is in a three-year journey of modifying and delivering the optimal Cloudera Data platform. He said that the vendor has invested dramatically in building out of products that deliver what customers need.

“When I say dramatically over the last 3 years, it’s through a combination of the money we’ve spent in research and development and the three acquisitions that we’ve done to fill this up. We spent a billion dollars to build up the product sets that we are announcing today. We are at the beginning of one of the most important times in our collective journey together. We have invested vastly in customer driven innovation. We've listened to the focus and the priorities that you have,” Sansbury explained.

With the launch being made in Singapore, Sansbury also stated that customers in the APAC region are among the most technically advanced and technically demanding as well as innovative as they use technology.

A deeper look into Anywhere Cloud

According to Abhas Ricky, Chief Business Officer and GM of Applied AI, Anymore Cloud is a platform where customers can build multiple products around it, on top of it, or leverage it as well.

“We have a marketplace. And we will allow partners to come through. We have a preliminary list and we’ll continue to build on top of that. I do think there's much more stickiness in the practitioner community that will begin to happen over time. And that will kind of determine some of the direction of the roadmap that we're going through,” he said.

Ricky also shared that Anywhere Coud is all about meeting customers’ expectations and is not really about who Cloudera is competing against.

“So, one of the big tailwinds we have is local inferencing. So private inferencing is becoming more important because of sovereignty, because of cost consideration, and because of token maxing to go through. Even two years back, people were just in the experimentation phase. Now a majority of the customers are starting to get into production phase as well. And I do think the cost overruns that people have on public cloud in the analytics world is nothing compared to the cost overruns in the agentic AI world on public cloud."

"So therefore, the customer's expectations have evolved, which is why I do think that competitively we're better positioned and because there is no one else out there who will be able to provide a similar capability in the category set that we operate in,” Ricky explained.

Meanwhile, Leo Brunnick, Chief Product Officer, explained that what differentiates Cloudera Anywhere Cloud to solutions by its competitors is its key focus components. This include its hybrid capabilities in having the same code anywhere, built on a unified fabric that has the same security and governance anywhere, provide AI-infused services which can be pre-integrated anywhere, built on a modular architecture and is extensible, being agentic first, having fast time to value and can be standalone or with Cloudera.

“We built Anywhere Cloud to be a standalone solution that does not need the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP). Instead, it sits side by side with CDP. Customers don’t need to update to take advantage of Anywhere Cloud,” Brunnick said.

The partner opportunity

For Ricky, the general response Cloudera has received from its partners has been overwhelmingly positive because of the fact that the majority of the local SIs see Anywhere Cloud as an opportunity to build applications on top of it.

“So, we have a services business, but that's just to get things started. Our core business is software. So, therefore, that has been very positive. The second thing is we've also had partners like one in Australia that deal with defense and highly secured clients and the partner told us that they can’t use Databricks, Snowflake or any of the hyperscalers. They can only use us and would like to build solutions and eventually even OEM with us. This is a new level of interest that we didn't have,” Ricky explained.

Ricky also shared that the data sovereignty conversations are definitely seeing a business opportunity for partners, be it in this region or globally, with many looking at how they can build their services around it.