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
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