Cloudera founder and CTO Amr Awadallah, account of the
challenges it and its customers face as they strive to exploit the full
potential of the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub technology is yet another example
of the problems enterprises face as they embark on journey of 'digital
transformation'.
When I interviewed
Awadallah last week he showed me a slide depicting how Cloudera sees
customers progressively embracing and extending their use of the Cloudera
Enterprise Data Hub technology. "The journey starts from using the system
for better operational efficiency, just for cheap storage," he explained.
"Then they start to use it for what we call 'extract, transform and load':
transforming the data from its unstructured form into a structured form that
they can use inside their database. That's a big bottleneck today for a lot of
organisations."
This is followed by data warehouse optimisation. Awadallah
claims that the cost of storage in conventional data warehouse technology means
that much data is relegated to the archives and for all practical purposes
lost. "The archive is the graveyard of data, he says.
Based on the claim that the Cloudera approach offers storage
at 1/30th to 1/100th cost of a data warehouse, he quips: "We offer economy
class storage. Data Warehouse is first class. With a data warehouse it's fly or
die."
Once organisations have achieved this level of usage, he
says, they can start to exploit the real potential of the technology, analysing
both structured and unstructured data, applying sophisticated data science
techniques and finally applying converged analytics. This, he says "is
when you have achieved enlightenment as an organisation. Where you have a
single place with all your data and your workloads all come to the data as
opposed to the data going to the workloads."
He claims that this is typically a four year journey for an
organisation. "It can be a ten-year journey and for some organisations, it
can be a one-year journey." Cloudera is only six years old, so none of its
customers has yet completed the journey, but many are at the 'data science'
stage, Awadallah says.
Not the least of the challenges for an organisation is how
it makes the transition from the technology being in the domain of IT to the
domain of lines of business - a transition shown in Awadallah's slide as a
dotted line between enterprise 'data warehouse optimisation' and 'agile
exploration'.
I asked him how Cloudera gets its customers across that
line. How they make the transition from Cloudera technology being the domain of
IT to the domain of lines of business.
The answer, it seems is not IT pushing the business along
the journey, telling them how they can make better use of the technology. Nor
is it the lines of business pressuring IT to provide the additional
functionality. "IT does not know how to do the sale. In fact IT is afraid
of this as there are new skills they have to learn," he says. "At a
minimum it forces them to do something new. IT sometimes fights this
change."
This places Cloudera in an awkward position: from having an
established relationship with IT, it moves to selling the benefits of its
technology to the business, potentially undermining established relationships.
"We try to make friends with the IT guys" Awadallah say. "We
give them training so they are less resistant."
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