Citadel Edge builds sovereign AI push around Cloudera
“We're doing a fair bit with Cloudera at the moment, especially in Australia and New Zealand,” says Todd Trevillion, Executive General Manager, Strategic Partnerships and Relationships, Citadel Edge.
As Cloudera relies on its partners to show customers the value of its solution, one partner that is looking to make the most out of the vendor’s innovations is Citadel Edge. The Australian specialist technology services partner is focused on providing secure technology for critical and regulated industries, an area that Cloudera sees as a sweet spot.
Both Citadel Edge and Cloudera are now working together to see how they can enable customers, especially those in highly regulated industries like government agencies, defense and financial services to have not only have better access to their data but also be able to control how the data is used.
According to Todd Trevillion, Executive General Manager, Strategic Partnerships and Relationships, Citadel Edge, Cloudera provides the company with the right type of data capability and AI capacity that customers are looking for today.
[Read more: Cloudera unveils Anywhere Cloud to give enterprises greater control over AI deployments]
“We’re both a customer and a partner of Cloudera. We're currently building out our own AI coding development environment to support our customer builds and implementations and utilizing that for QA and testing. We also won the hackathon organized by Cloudera in Australia,” Trevillion said.
Trevillion explained that Citadel Edge’s selling point to customers is its hybrid and sovereign capabilities. This is also one of the reasons why he feels Cloudera’s Anywhere Cloud would be a good fit for the type of customers they deal with.
Building on a sweet spot
For Derek Judge, Alliances & Channels Lead, APAC, for Cloudera, Cloudera's sweet spot and where its well-entrenched is regulated industries. This includes government, defense, banking. But what we're finding is that that definition of regulation industries is gradually expanding.
Judge explained that even industries like telco and utilities are now being classified as critical infrastructure and have a high level of governance over it.
Given that Citadel Edge is also focused on providing sovereign capabilities to its customers, the partnership story began when Cloudera ran an AI hackathon with a few partners in Australia. Not only did Citadel Edge won the hackathon, they also used that as a demo to their board and decided to use it internally for things like bid processing and so on. The success meant that the solution can now be also taken to customers.
“Going through the AI hackathon meant they could get their hands on it, use it, show what it can do, and so their board could then sign off on building a practice around it,” Judge said.
He added that looking at the Cloudera partnerships that are coming through, even existing dormant partners are now coming back to the vendor to work on data and AI projects and expansions. He said the dormant partners are looking at Cloudera for building joint solutions, while new partners are building new business practices around Cloudera.
All about sovereign capabilities
“So sovereign inferencing as well as sovereign hosting of the data and information is critical for our clients. And one of the value propositions obviously of Cloudera is they are bringing the platform to the data, and that's what sovereignty is. It is all about making sure that you're not sending data; you've got control over your data and know where it goes and what it's being used for. So, we're definitely seeing a lot more questions and a lot more interest in solutions that do provide that sovereignty,” Trevillion added.
While Citadel Edge also partners other data management vendors, Trevillion shared that one of the reasons why they also bought Cloudera as a customer is because it provides all not just provides a truly sovereign option, but it also provides a lot more governance, guardrails as well as traceability and observability that goes in or being used across all of their data and technology stack.
“We're doing a fair bit with Cloudera at the moment, especially in Australia and New Zealand. We've got a number of partner initiative fundings. We're looking at building out sort of commercial offerings with them. With Anywhere Cloud, our go to market and our story to our customers is going to be all about sovereignty at the end of the day,” he added.
For Trevillion and Citadel Edge, its all about ensuring that Cloudera delivers on their promise which will be perfect for the customers.
“It will be available soon but we're wanting to get a pre-entry into the program to start testing it and playing with it ourselves,” he added on the availability and usage of Anywhere Cloud.
Looking ahead, Trevillion wants Cloudera to make that their products are continually patched and updated.