Cloudera makes waves in ANZ with hybrid data approach

As the success of the modern organisation increasingly relies on the ability to manage and leverage data, trusted vendors that support both cloud and legacy infrastructure are being sought out by business decision makers of every industry.

At Cloudera's EVOLVE24 event in Singapore, the hybrid data company offered insights into Cloudera's impact and intentions for the ANZ market, including how data management and analysis can and is empowering success for customers.

Data regulation drives widespread appeal for Cloudera

Cloudera solutions are often associated with heavily regulated industries, such as public sector or financial services organisations, due to the ability to adhere to strict compliance requirements. In addition, the balance between compliance and innovation requires a robust underlying infrastructure that is often hybrid. However, as all business leaders recognise how swiftly any brand can fall from grace following a breach, Cloudera is being utilised by businesses big and small, from every sector within Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).

As Wee Tee Lim, RVP for ASEAN and Taiwan, shared with TechDay, "Any large organisation that has significant brand value is always very, very careful with reputational risk, because any leakage of consumer data puts them into crisis management mode."

He continues, "Beyond the financial services industry (FSI), which is high brand value and regulated, we are also seeing equally stringent practices in non-regulated but high brand value organisations, telcos being the obvious one. To use telcos as an example, they have been transforming themselves to become digital lifestyle providers - they are not just selling you bandwidth and SIM cards anymore. And while they are not as heavily regulated, they are extremely careful with how they manage data, what data they manage, and how they use data."

On the balance between regulation and innovation, Lim says, "Some of our clients veer to the extreme in terms of conservatism, and at the same time are trying to be a bit more aggressive in using that data. So they turn to us, because securing that data, making sure that it's secure at scale and secure in a uniform manner, is crucial, and it's all under the same policy."

Other Cloudera executives spoke of the growing desire to utilise data to realise more robust business strategies, automation, customer service and more.

Echoing Lim, Priyank Patel, Cloudera's VP of Product Management, comments, "There is an appetite to move fast and adopt and experiment quickly, to see where the boundaries are, where the state-of-the-art is. We see that happening regardless of industry."

Allowing for flexibility through a hybrid model

Cloudera's executives pose the point that underpinning investment into new data solutions is a desire for business transformation. Business decision makers are asking questions such as: How do I increase revenue, reduce costs and mitigate risk?

As a fundamental part of this transformation, throughout ANZ organisations are looking to experiment with cloud and the likes of AI. In this way, the option of a flexible, hybrid infrastructure is very compelling as it allows for the business to adapt as needed. Abhas Ricky, Cloudera Chief Strategy Officer, comments on the gap between business goals and reality, and how hybrid architecture accommodates unpredictable timelines and allows for evolving targets and requirements.

He says, "Australia has the maximum number of prepaid Cloud Credits from hyperscalers like any of the best markets, but it also has to accept a disproportionate number of prepared credits that have been unused, and they won't be able to use them in time - be that in the next couple of weeks or five years. That tells you that customers are not able to migrate workloads as fast as they would have liked or they had envisioned before. This reinforces our belief that hybrid is the way forward."

Remus Lim, Cloudera SVP, APJ, shares how hybrid architecture can help conserve costs, especially for big players in banking, telco and the public sector.

He says, "Generally speaking, these organisations are all very cost conscious. They are not only looking at ways to increase revenue, but ways to reduce costs. In fact, this is a driver to look into cloud. But if their idea is to go to the cloud to save costs from other regions, what we're actually seeing is it becomes more expensive. This is where our sweet spot is, because we're hybrid. Organisations can choose to decide what workload they want to put on a cloud, and if it doesn't work, they still have the option to bring it back."

Data analysis to power success

Data analytics is a prominent way in which organisations are looking to save on costs and improve business success and revenue. Of the many use cases that showcase the power of advanced data analytics, Lim highlights Cloudera customers in education and banking.

He says, "[Education providers] do a lot of analysis in terms of what cost works best for what type of students, or student performance. In fact, we're going to see AI dealing with student performance. How do you project your student within the next three years? Are they lagging or are they performing? AI and data analytics can help with this."

On banking Lim says, "All banks have fraud detection. The difference is how they do it. Before now, it was all rule based, and if banks start building a lot of rules over time they become obsolete. AI is different because it's self-learning. More and more we can modernise use cases in terms of anti-money laundering, fraud detection, personalisation, and more."

According to Lim, these ideas and possibilities are already playing out with prominent Cloudera customers, including several in Australia and New Zealand.

Afterpay, an Australian fintech offering 'Buy Now, Pay Later' services, is using Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) to run streaming analytics and advanced Machine Learning for real-time fraud detection. This helps Afterpay identify, access and reduce business risk relating to fraud for its customers. According to the company, CDP provides Afterpay with a more stable production environment that is flexible, scalable and built for growth to accommodate large-scale data. This ensures analytics can be performed accurately at speed without compromising operational efficiencies.

On education, CDP enabled Deakin, the Australian tertiary provider, to manage the growth and distribution of its data, ingesting over 8.8 million events per day from systems such as learning management, administration, and occupancy analytics. With Cloudera, Deakin has empowered academics to understand student behaviour and optimise engagement - while enabling leadership to make better decisions to improve the campus experience. The analytics capability has been well received, scoring high marks for ease of use (4 out of 5 score) and usability (71%) in an internal user research study.

Finally, The Australian Defense Force (ADF) is replacing its legacy e-health record system with a modern patient-centric health solution. Cloudera will deliver private-cloud-native data engineering capabilities using its CDP Data Engineering solution and will be responsible for ingesting data from multiple sources, including legacy systems and new data streams. According to the company, it aims to create secure data products that streamline and operationalise the data contained in ADF's new Health Knowledge Management System, as well as provide fast reliable data that will enable data scientists to extract value faster, regardless of workload, to support improved decision-making.