TECH TALK
OIL OF THE FUTURE
Dr . Amr Awadallah , Co-Founder & CTO , Cloudera , talks to Intelligent CIO ME about leveraging big data processing , the coming of the data revolution and the company ’ s new open source framework , ‘ Apache Spot ’.
Can you give us a brief introduction about Cloudera and its recent introduction into the region ? The solution we provide is a very powerful big data management platform that can do three things very well compared to legacy data systems : ( 1 ) it can scale much better from a technology and economics point of view ( i . e . cost per terabyte ), ( 2 ) it can process data of any type , not just structured transactions , and ( 3 ) it can perform much more advanced analytics and machine learning as opposed to just SQL . We have a lot of use cases across our customer base , but some of the key ones are : ( 1 ) deep insights about customers and their likes / dislikes , ( 2 ) creating better and new products from the data , a key theme enabled by the Internetof-things , and ( 3 ) lowering business risk through better cyber security , better fraud detection , and more accurate compliance for regulations .
We have more than 1,000 paying customers worldwide , and the majority of them are large corporations with more than $ 1B in annual revenues . We started in the US , followed by Europe / Middle- East then Asia-Pacific , so naturally we have a lot more customers in the former compared to the latter . Our strongest industries are Finance ( Banks / Insurance ), Telecommunications , Technology , and Government .
That said , we also have customers in Health , Manufacturing , Agriculture ,
Transportation , Retail , etc . Some of our large brand name customers are : Mastercard , Telkomsel , Vodafone , Airtel , DBS , RBS , BT , Marks & Spencer , Samsung , Barclays , SFR , True , GoPro , Experian , Western Union , Schipol Airport , FINRA , Disney , Tata Sky , Cerner , JP Morgan , Monsanto , AOL , Intel , Qualcomm , Chevron , CBSi , Explorys , Concur , Commonwealth Bank , Siemens , and Toyota .
Some of our most impactful applications tend to be in the health space , where a number of hospitals and medical institutions are using our software to better predict diseases or patient complications before they take place . We just started a presence in the Middle East earlier this year , before that we managed the region out of France . We decided to manage the Middle East region out of Dubai , hence why we launched this office . We now have five employees local in the country ( we have more than 1500 worldwide ), and we plan to add many more over the coming months .
What new partnerships has Cloudera earmarked for 2016 / 2017 and beyond to best provide further services to the region ’ s businesses ? We have a rich ecosystem of more than 2,600 + partners worldwide that either sell software / hardware products that integrate with our platform , or provide consulting / implementation services around our platform . Some of our key international partners are : Intel , Dell EMC , Microsoft , Accenture , Infosys , Tableau , Informatica , but there are many others . Also , whenever we enter a new region we establish partnerships with a number of the smaller solution integration providers focused on that region , have a handful of those already in the middle east and plan to add a lot more over the coming months .
Looking at 2017 , what does Cloudera see as the main demands of end-user
78 INTELLIGENTCIO www . intelligentcio . com