Unlocking the potential of Big Data

Amr Awadallah, Ph.D., Founder and CTO – Cloudera tells VARINDIA of how important and impactful Big Data is to an organization, irrespective of its size, besides throwing some light on the functioning of the company in the India market -

What is Cloudera's focus when it comes to the Indian market?

Cloudera delivers a modern platform for data management and analytics. As the first commercial provider of Apache Hadoop-related software and services, Cloudera provides the world’s fastest, easiest, and most secure Hadoop platform to help businesses across the globe solve the most challenging problems with data.

We see a massive opportunity in the Asia Pacific region and India, as they hold immense business potential. Our aim is to have more offices across the region so that we can be closer to our customers. Increasingly, we are also collaborating with partners and government organizations to better serve the Indian and Asia Pacific market. We can do this as Cloudera’s technology is poised to help transform how organizations maximize the value of one of their most important resources today – their data.

Knowledge is power, and we also want to empower IT professionals in India with the necessary data and analytics skills and groom future-ready workforces for the region.

How big is your customer base in India? Can you name a few of your clients?

Our customer base in India is growing. We recently announced that Bharti Airtel Limited (Airtel), India’s largest telecommunications services provider, has adopted Cloudera Enterprise to build a 360-degree, data-enabled view of their customers in India, enabling them to better leverage customer data to execute successful omni-channel campaigns and influence buyers in a highly competitive market. We hope to work on more projects as such.

How can organizations, irrespective of its size, derive value from their data? How does Cloudera help ensure that they maximize value out of it?

Big data technologies have helped to transform raw data into useful and meaningful information, allowing businesses and organizations, regardless of size, to draw deeper conclusions and derive at detailed insights. This, in turn, has led to informed business decision making, better visibility into business operations, industries, and markets.

However, the use of big data is so much larger than just that. Big data has also made it possible for governments to defend against terrorist attacks, medical researchers to predict disease spread patterns, agricultural companies to increase crop yields, and so much more. Essentially, big data has enabled organizations to achieve what was previously not possible. It is bringing about a major impact to our daily lives, be it in retail, financial services, telecoms, healthcare, education, or more.

Smaller organizations can start small with big data, but can benefit fully nevertheless. Big data can enable small business to become more efficient and stay competitive. 

What are the security risks involved in such cases?

With the reliance on technology and big data, cybersecurity will continue to become an increasingly crucial boardroom conversation. More and more, organizations will realize that big data analytics is crucial in detecting advanced cyber threats, and that this is not fully possible with traditional technologies.

According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, 72 percent of IT security practitioners surveyed recognize the importance of big data analytics in detecting advanced cyber threats. Meanwhile, majority of these IT professionals surveyed also believe it is impossible to get ahead of advanced threats using big data analytics with traditional technologies.

As such, we are constantly evolving our software and service to enable enterprises to get ahead of these threats. In fact, we recently announced an agreement with Niara, a recognized leader in user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA), to resell Cloudera Enterprise as part of its behavioral analytics platform for advanced threat detection. Once an attack is detected, Niara uses the power of Cloudera Enterprise to deliver a historically complete forensic record of the affected entities to a security analyst, reducing the time for investigation and response from hours and days to minutes.

With the right technology in place, enterprises can now get full value from their data, while staying protected.

How does your business model work? Do you also work with other technology partners in the Hadoop platform?

Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified platform for big data: The Enterprise Data Hub. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, process, and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments, all while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data.

Founded in 2008, Cloudera was the first supporter of Apache Hadoop for the enterprise. Cloudera also offers software for business critical data challenges, including storage, access, management, analysis, security, and search.

With customer success as a priority, we’ve enabled long-term, successful deployments for hundreds of customers, with petabytes of data collectively under management, across diverse industries, to date.

We understand that the Hadoop ecosystem is complex and constantly changing. That is why Cloudera works with partners to drive innovation across the Hadoop ecosystem, and ensure that our customers always have access to purpose-built, integrated solutions regardless of industry. There is also the Cloudera Connect Partner Program, built with currently more than 700 companies strong, which is designed to champion partner advancement and solution development for the big data ecosystem.

What kind of products and solutions do you offer?

Cloudera’s platform, which is designed to specifically address customer opportunities and challenges in big data, is available in the form of free/ unsupported products (CDH or Cloudera Express, for those interested solely in a free Hadoop distribution), or as supported, enterprise-class software (Cloudera Enterprise - in Basic, Flex, and Data Hub editions) in the form of an annual subscription. All the integration work is done for our customers, and the entire solution is thoroughly tested for enterprise requirements and fully documented.

Cloudera’s combined offering of differentiated software (open and closed source), support, training, professional services, and indemnity, brings customers the greatest business value, in the shortest amount of time, at the lowest TCO.