Cloudera, providers of a hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI, recently hosted a data and AI conference called EVOLVE24 in Dubai at the Museum of the Future.
The event gathered industry leaders, customers, and partners to discuss strategies concerning data-driven insights and scalable data management in the era of generative AI.
The EVOLVE24 Dubai event began with keynote sessions from prominent Cloudera executives including CEO Charles Sansbury, Frank O’Dowd, Chief Revenue Officer, and Abhas Ricky, Chief Strategy Officer. The welcome keynote set the tone for the rest of the event as Cloudera laid out some impressive statistics concerning their presence in the META region. 118+ enterprises have adopted the use of the Cloudera platform in the region making it one of their fastest growing markets worldwide ,with a 38% increase in new META customers and a 43% growth in META region revenue. The organisation’s primary strategic priorities were also outlined, including delivering true hybrid support, enabling modern architectures and accelerating enterprise AI.
“Cloudera helps manage 25+ exabytes of data at scale and provides enterprises context for that data and insights into how to better use data”, said Charles Sansbury, CEO of Cloudera, who expressed excitement about their market opportunities, world-class customers and supportive investors. On the topic of AI he said, “Every customer is looking at how they can use AI, whereas we are looking at how to help them operationalise their AI models and which ones they should focus on putting to use”. The overall mission statement is to position Cloudera as the leader in hybrid data, analytics and AI. Sansbury concluded his presentation by proudly stating that, “We help solve some of the most complex data problems for the world’s biggest companies”.
Abhas Ricky, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudera, took to the stage to speak about their strategic priorities as a hybrid open data lakehouse for analytics and AI. “CIOs understand the value of a hybrid solution and for us that can mean meeting the demands of private to public, public to private or multi-cloud environment infrastructures”.
Later keynote discussions hosted by Priyank Patel, VP of AI & ML at Cloudera, Venkat Rajaji: SVP – Product Management, Cloudera, & Ali Rey, Group Head of Technology Platforms at Emirates NBD centred around product updates and the customer-driven innovations that are helping to improve their open data lakehouse approach. These improvements included additions to the Cloudera AI assistants such as SQL AI assistant, AI chatbot in Cloudera data visualisation and the Cloudera Machine Learning Co-Pilot. There were also insights into AI application lifecycles such as recognising the need for trusted data to “Build AI applications, host models and monetise endpoints”. Customer insights included such findings as: “Customers want a cloud-native experience that can be deployed anywhere. This requires a consumer grade experience, the ability to spin up and spin down for easy consumption and versionless software by always being on the latest version”. The presentation also outlined the benefits of the Cloudera private link network which provides a unified, cross-cloud private connectivity service, enabling enterprises to securely manage data-intensive workloads across multiple cloud environments. Ultimately, all of these advances highlight Cloudera’s commitment to creating a true hybrid experience that offers a unified runtime and a hybrid control plane for managing all the deployments private, public and hybrid. They closed the session by commenting that, “Cloudera helps you take back control of your data, workloads, deployments and spending by eliminating wasted resources”.
The speakers at EVOLVE24 were also joined by leading voices from across various industries, including financial services, telecommunications and manufacturing. Some of these special guest keynote speakers included, Chad Foster an award-winning business leader, international keynote speaker, & author of Blind Ambition and R “Ray” Wang the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc.
These keynotes sessions were followed later in the day by hands-on workshops tackling topics such accelerating enterprise AI, architecting for trusted data and how to deliver ‘true’ hybrid. These breakout sessions allowed EVOLVE24 attendees the opportunity to learn about the value of modern data architecture, the benefits of a true hybrid cloud, and how the combination can accelerate enterprise AI.
Sponsored by IBM, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Red Hat, the EVOLVE24 event was fully committed to showing attendees how the infinite possibilities of trusted data today can inform tomorrow’s business.
Cloudera enables companies to harness the power of their data for analysis and AI-powered decision-making. Their key commitments remain to deliver scalable, open, and secure data management with portable, cloud-native data analytics.
Image Credit: Cloudera
