On this episode of The Six Five – On The Road hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead welcome Santiago Giraldo, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Cloudera, and Carolyn Duby, Field CTO and Cybersecurity GTM Lead for Cloudera.Their discussion covers:
- Data in Motion risks: security, compliance, reliability, and cost
- Data management risk mitigation in digital transformation
- How Cloudera assists in getting the maximum value out of your data
- Security trends driving Cloudera growth: cloud adoption, data privacy regulations, and cyberattacks
- Cloudera’s open and interoperable toolset strategy
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Hi, this is Pat Moorhead and The Six Five is live here in Miami at Cloudera Sales Kickoff for the fiscal year 2024. We are not broadcasting from the beach, but I have to tell you, it is amazing out there. The weather is great but as I said before, the only thing second-best to being on the beach in Miami is being here with my bestie Daniel Newman from Futurum. How are you?
Daniel Newman: Pat, it’s good to have The Six Five on the road, here in Miami at the Fontainebleau, which is a historic resort.
Patrick Moorhead: I know, yes.
Daniel Newman: The energy, maybe even some of the people are hearing it out in the background, this sales kickoff is the jet propulsion of the data narrative that’s moving forward right now. Cloudera, as it moves forward beyond the Rule of 40, towards the Rule of 50, as a private company, a lot of excitement here and we felt it last night with almost 1,000 Clouderans out on the lawn. So it’s been great and having these conversations here is always a lot of fun.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it is good. So while we do love to hear ourselves talk, we want to welcome back second-time Six Five guest, Carolyn, and Santiago. How are you doing?
Santiago Giraldo: Doing really well. Thanks for having us again.
Carolyn Duby: Yeah, doing great. Thanks so much for inviting us back on again after the last performance.
Patrick Moorhead: I know, you’re back.
Daniel Newman: Did we double-check that?
Santiago Giraldo: I don’t know. We’re going to have to see. I think it snuck in last minute.
Patrick Moorhead: They got good views on their last video, so we wanted to bring them back but it is amazing, the amount of energy on day three of any type of sales event. Given the amount of fun that everybody has, here we are, day three. Hot energy is high. But I want to talk to something that I know that is near and dear to your customer’s hearts and also a big capability for Cloudera, and that is Data in Motion with the acronym of DiM, not to be confused with the acronym of DaR, Data at Rest.
Daniel Newman: Big D, little I, big M.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes.
Daniel Newman: This is actually a very bright conversation, not dim. Carolyn and Santiago, real quickly, we know you’re alumni and everyone sees your lower third, so we know who you are, but for the sake of the audience, just quick, what do you do for Cloudera?
Carolyn Duby: I’m a field CTO in the Americas region and I’ve spent a long time in the Data in Motion space and I’m sure it will be coming out, but it’s a huge passion of mine. So I’ve been involved with stream processing in cybersecurity. I was a big proponent of Apache Metron, so I have a little bit of a passion there.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s great.
Santiago Giraldo: My name is Santiago. I lead Product Marketing for Cloudera’s data services, in addition to Technical Marketing. A little bit about my background, when it comes to data engineering and just generally, those workflows, Data in Motion has been a big part of my career up to this point. Before I was in marketing, I was in engineering and working with data as a data scientist. So very near and dear to my heart, even though my role has somewhat evolved here.
Daniel Newman: It’s great. Thanks for coming on the show and we’re going to have a lot of data folks who are going to watch this video, but for the more generalized audience here, can you explain or define Data in Motion?
Carolyn Duby: So Data in Motion, it’s becoming of greater importance as we look at the digital journey that a lot of our customers have been going on. So it’s really two parts. The first part is the first-mile problem of how do I get the data from where it is into where it needs to go. So it’s that first-mile problem, and sometimes, it’s capturing data that we don’t capture at the moment, and other times, it’s moving the data that we have, more efficiently. So being able to deliver it in real-time as opposed to in a batch strategy.
So the second part is being able to then make sense of that data as quickly as you can. So being able to do things like cybersecurity, fraud detection, real-time trading and financial analysis, and customer experience, of course. Being able to do those types of decisions in real-time, as opposed to having to wait for some batch to occur whenever it occurs.
Santiago Giraldo: To supplement that, when we’re thinking about Data in Motion, I think that the world has evolved in a lot of ways. Yes, it’s definitely about the timeliness of your data; how you get it from point A to point B; how you end up using it; how effective it can be in industries such as manufacturing, where, in a couple of minutes, it could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But in addition to that, it’s about surpassing a lot of the hurdles that have come up in today’s world. So one of the things that I always think about is what happens if you want to move data from say, S3 to Azure. Today, you can’t do that, but with Data in Motion in Cloudera, you can. Or what happens if you want to go from Confluent Cloud to Snowflake, something that doesn’t even involve Cloudera or CDP at all? We enable that in a drag-and-drop interface, making it super dead simple to get to work as quickly as possible.
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t know how you do multi-cloud without moving data between Azure and AWS and GCP, but I imagine it’s pretty ugly without having a consistent set of tools though.
Daniel Newman: So Data in Motion though, immediately for me, it throws all kinds of red flags because, of course, when you start moving data around, it creates new security risks, it creates all kinds of compliance risks. So it’s a unique capability. So when you talk about Data in Motion, you’re really talking about being an enabler.
Broadly though, within your roles, what are the big challenges? So I imagine maybe what I mentioned is one of them, right? We’re trying to deal with security. What are some of the big challenges that you guys are hearing as you’re out because, as a field CTO, as a leading product marketing, they’re in your ear? They’re telling you, “Thanks Cloudera. This is what we need your help with. Can you fix this for us?”
Carolyn Duby: So security and governance are a huge concern for our customers and it’s a huge problem when data is moving. It’s more at risk than when it’s at rest. I’m sure there’s people that would probably disagree with me, but when the data is going from one place to another, when it’s going through the pipeline, you have to make sure that it’s getting there securely, it’s not being intercepted, and that you know exactly what happened to it, so you can trust it from the start to the finish. So being able to understand the prominence of the data, and then be able to land it securely to all of the different places that you need to land it. So it’s challenging.
Santiago Giraldo: I think, in addition to that, we need to think about security in a very pragmatic way, especially for larger enterprises today. I think it’s especially difficult when you’re dealing with a bunch of disparate systems and a bunch of silos where you might have duplicate data, when it’s in motion, when you move it from one place to another, or where you’re trying to use it in C2, whatever it might be, if you have those gaps in security that are blind spots for your IT department, that are blind spots for your users, it creates significant problems across the board.
Daniel Newman: Also, security is one thing I would have to also imagine. It’s funny, they say there’s only a few truisms in life, taxes, death, and I think it’s multi-cloud across enterprise. Quite frankly, I talk to a major enterprise on average once a week, and there are not a single one that I talk to who doesn’t have multiple IS providers. They all have on-prem, unless they’re a born-in-the-cloud company in the last decade, but still, it is the truth.
What capabilities or what types of problems are you trying to solve across multi-cloud? There’s egress charges, just crazy stuff like that. Maybe you can’t do that, but what are the challenges to move data around and get value out of that data, regardless of where it sits, either in the public cloud or even in the private cloud?
Santiago Giraldo: So I can try to tackle that one. One of the big things that I think we do well with Cloudera, is that we’re realists. So we don’t pretend like everybody’s just going to use a Cloudera Data Platform for absolutely everything. You’re going to have lines of businesses that are going to use a bunch of different tools or disparate systems or whatever it might be. That’s not an excuse to compromise security. That’s not an excuse to slow down workloads or have to write custom code, and that’s not an excuse for settling for one-directional ingest streams. You have to have that versatility and agility so that you can get the job done in the way that it needs to get done, and that’s what we truly enable.
Daniel Newman: So draw some trend lines for me because as I see it, it sounds like the trend of multi-cloud is, I think, well-understood. Pat, you and I have been preaching the hybrid trend.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: Hybrid kind of multi-
Patrick Moorhead: By the way, before it was cool.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Now, it’s a thing, and everybody, and I’ve got papers, 12 years ago that wrote about that.
Daniel Newman: We’re visionaries.
Carolyn Duby: So you were ahead of the times.
Patrick Moorhead: How about that? No, literally, it’s one of the benefits of being a smaller analyst firm is that you can see things more quickly and also, I have 20 years of operational experience that helps a lot to see through that, but I appreciate that and Dan’s coined a bunch of stuff.
Daniel Newman: So with all that in mind though, what are the trend lines that are being defined by all these because I think I asked it in another with challenges, but I guess my thought process is, trend lines define products. One of the things I’ve heard here quite a bit, by the way, is product fit. There’s a lot of sentiment among the salesforce that product fit is finally here for Cloudera. How is all these things crossing over at the right time going to drive that growth opportunity as you guys see it?
Carolyn Duby: So Data Flow and Data in Motion has been data streaming. We’ve been involved in that industry and that use case for a while now. So we’re already on the second iteration of streaming systems. So we had Storm and now we have FLaNK with stream processing. So we have a lot of experience in that area. We recognize we’re a leader. We recognized that Data Flow was an incredibly unique product. In fact, our customers tell us that there’s nothing else in the market like it. So we’ve been in the industry for a while.
We’ve been seeing the value come out of the customers, but I also think a lot of customers are just getting into the real-time use cases because they’ve been doing their job and doing their digital transformation, but now we’re getting to the point where they have to up their game and they have to go more quickly in order to make their decisions. They have to know more about their enterprises and their operations. So just knowing and having observability on your enterprise, and knowing all of the things that are happening, and being able to assess that in real-time is a huge capability that a lot of organizations need to do in order to make it to the next level. So we’ve been in this business for a while, but I think it’s coming to fruition in terms of the real need and drive inside the business to build those use cases.
Santiago Giraldo: Just to add to that, I think when you’re talking about trend lines, I see two things that are critically important. As you mentioned, the customers that we talk to, I think that these things are really prevalent. One is how you enable true multifunction analytics in an end-to-end way. So how do you enable the data life cycle from that ingest point, from that streaming data, all the way through to the decision point in the most effective way, and cost-effective way, and the fastest way possible?
One of the big things that we’re seeing is this notion of a hybrid cloud, as you pointed out already. So what happens when you move workloads into an AWS or an Azure, and you’re needing to operate those? Yes, with multi-cloud as we’ve been talking, but what if you need to repatriate some of those workloads for, let’s say, compute-intensive machine learning back into your data center? I think that’s a trend that we’re seeing more and more, and it’s even more important in terms of Data in Motion, on how you can seamlessly move that data, transfer those workloads, in a secure and effective way.
Patrick Moorhead: Now that’s exciting stuff. So essentially, trends, if I can paraphrase, so speeding everything up, go into real-time and hybrid cloud. Is there anything that’s changing or trends you’re seeing in security as all of this is changing? I know we talked about it a little bit, but how is it changing?
Carolyn Duby: So I’ll say that, obviously, from a cybersecurity perspective, there’s a much higher viewpoint on security and it’s much more important. Just being able to have a total picture of all of your log sources and all of the various tools. There’s a tool explosion on the cybersecurity spot. So being able to bring everything into a central point and being able to then do your analysis on that.
So some of the issues that we’ve seen with some of our customers, is that, for example, they’ve got so many different endpoints that are having all of the same types of data, but they don’t have one place. It’s, again, the same problem of having a specific vendor, handling that specific vendor’s data, but not being open enough to bring everything together to really help the customer. So we’re trying to get to be an inclusive environment where you can bring together all of your data silos.
Patrick Moorhead: Now is this just for the regulated industries and customers, or do you see this increased intensity and security challenge across all the verticals that you participate in?
Carolyn Duby: I think it’s pretty much across the verticals. If you look, almost any company nowadays, as a technology company, you see what happened last year with the pipeline hack, new ransomware, people couldn’t pump gas. People couldn’t get meat because of the JBS meat packing plant ransomware attack. So more and more, our daily lives are affected by cybersecurity and it’s more and more important that almost every company out there is concerned about it.
Daniel Newman: I think the security alert is higher. I think that’s part of the more challenging macro. Companies are raising it because of the risk profile of having a breach, having a ransomware attack because it’s so damaging, both to your immediate operations, but also, the brand integrity. If you’re a public-facing company, you’ll never quite recover. It takes a long time, and we saw that with companies like Target. It took years before people had that same trust after that big breach, and that was a decade or more ago. So it’s just time-sensitive and it’s a board-imperative right now.
One last thing, because we’re about time, but I want to double-click on Flow for a minute because I’m hearing what you’re saying, and I want to reiterate, when companies are going through a decision-making process of which tools and which companies to partner with and invest in, in a multi-cloud journey, what option do they have if they don’t go with Flow to truly address the multi-cloud requirement and multi-cloud mandate that they have? Because as an analyst, I’m looking, I’m like, “It doesn’t seem like there’s anything else that takes care of the compliance, the governance, the security, and still meets true hybrid and multi,” but you have to know because you’re out there selling. What are you selling against?
Carolyn Duby: So there’s lots of different tools in this space, but a lot of them are dealing with either batch data, so they’re only handling the batch use cases. So if you’re streaming, they’re not going to work for you. Then there are other tools that are just handling those point-to-point solutions. So if you want to move data into say, Snowflake, you’ve got the Snowflake tools to do that. But what happens when you want to do Mongo or what happens when you want to do something else? It’s another tool, and that’s more infrastructure, more licensing, more operational overhead in the pipeline.
So it makes for a very complex environment where you’ve got the team that’s doing the data engineering now has a lot of things to manage, too many things to develop on. So they’re not as productive as they want to be, and cost-effective. So I think those are some major themes that we’re seeing from our customers. Certain companies, they only care about their own data. They don’t care about solving the problem as a general solution.
Patrick Moorhead: IT has always been an accordion where it disaggregates and then it re-aggregates. Typically, it’s driven by growth or some big tectonic shift, and especially as we’re getting into some interesting economic times, part of the CIO agenda, I know, has been to, “Let’s look, do we need 27 different tools to do 10 different tasks? Are they in order of magnitude better at either delivering what we need to do or an order of magnitude in cost savings and capability?”
I think this would be an advantage for Cloudera in that you do serve the entire pipeline. You do have a lot of best-of-breed capabilities, but just like it’s true in life, you can always find some new startup who comes up with something. 12 guys in a motor home to crack out something that’s amazing.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, basement.
Patrick Moorhead: But it might just not make sense. So maybe it’s more my editorial than asking you a question, but is there anything relatable there on what they’re telling you, your customers?
Carolyn Duby: I think it speaks to the innovation and to the problems in that part of the pipeline. It’s a very innovative space. We always have to keep moving to keep up with the competition. We’re always making ourselves more open. So we’ve been on an open-source, open-systems journey for a long time, and a lot of people don’t necessarily think that’s the best. They’re like, “Why would you spend your development time building tools that are going to move data to a competitor?” It’s a valid question, but I think it’s part of our strategy as a company to help the customers be most effective at solving their problems.
Patrick Moorhead: And, by the way, I also like it because you’re not afraid. I view it as an industry analyst as confidence. You want to build a highway to your competitor and vice versa. In my head, that company’s got to be really confident about what they have. Let’s flatten the playing field or open up the playing field a little, and let the best product and service win.
Daniel Newman: But other than Apple, there’s not any truly closed ecosystems left, especially at that scale.
Patrick Moorhead: True. It’s been great having you both on the show. Santiago, I think you maybe had a last remark. It looked like you were trying to get in there.
Santiago Giraldo: Oh, no, no, no. It’s totally fine. I was just going to add to what Carolyn was saying in terms that the piecemeal approach is never ideal, but then in addition to that, even internally, you have different areas of the business that have tools that they’re going to use that aren’t going to be Cloudera by design. For example, your marketing team might be collecting information from Marketo. Your CRM system might be whatever is out there. You’re using Salesforce for certain things. Those are not replaceable items. So the more open we can be and the more that we can inter-operate, even the things that don’t compete with Cloudera, the better.
Daniel Newman: You’re getting all that data into a single source of truth so that you can use it across all your apps, across all your clouds, across all your infrastructure.
Patrick Moorhead: Great point.
Daniel Newman: If there was only a company that could do that. All right, Carolyn and Santiago-
Carolyn Duby: I wonder what kind of company could do that?
Daniel Newman: Thank you so much for joining us here at The Six Five.
Santiago Giraldo: Thanks for having us.
Carolyn Duby: Thank you very much. It’s been great.
Santiago Giraldo: Definitely.
Daniel Newman: All right, everybody, if you like what you hear, hit that subscribe button. We appreciate you, as always, tuning into the show. Lots more video here on The Six Five, both here at the Cloudera SKO fiscal year ’24 at the Fontainebleau in Miami, but also, all the interviews that Patrick and I do across all the different Six Five platforms.
But for now, it’s time to go. So bye. See you all later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
