Cloudera pushes hybrid data platform

Cloudera said on April 8 it is extending support for its hybrid data and artificial intelligence platform to 2032 as it tries to keep customers running across cloud and data center systems. (cloudera.com) The company said the update brings simultaneous software updates for on-premises and cloud deployments, plus a single platform experience across both environments. It also said customers can push extra computing demand into the cloud without moving or duplicating data through a feature it calls Cloud Bursting. (cloudera.com) A hybrid data platform is software that lets companies store, govern, and analyze information in more than one place at once, including their own servers, public clouds, and edge devices such as factory sensors. Cloudera says its platform uses the same services, application programming interfaces, and user interface across those locations so teams do not have to rebuild applications for each one. (cloudera.com) That pitch lands as companies try to add artificial intelligence without rewriting old data systems that still run finance, telecom, and government workloads. Gartner said worldwide artificial intelligence spending will reach $2.52 trillion in 2026, and Cloudera cited a $3.33 trillion figure for 2027 in its announcement. (gartner.com) (cloudera.com) Cloudera is also leaning on open formats that let different analytics engines read the same data. The company said its Lakehouse Optimizer now automates maintenance for Apache Iceberg tables, which the Apache project describes as a table format that lets engines including Spark, Trino, Flink, Hive, Presto, and Impala work on the same large datasets. (cloudera.com) (iceberg.apache.org) Cloudera said that optimizer improves query speed by 38% and cuts storage overhead by as much as 36% with minimal manual work. It also said customers can share live Iceberg tables with external platforms without copying the underlying data, a feature aimed at reducing duplicate datasets and governance problems. (cloudera.com) The company has been sharpening that message for months. Its press release archive shows a February 9 announcement on artificial intelligence inferencing and unified data access, a March 23 event framed around the “Anywhere Cloud” era, and the April 8 platform update. (cloudera.com) Cloudera has been private since October 8, 2021, when it completed a $5.3 billion acquisition by Clayton, Dubilier and Rice and KKR. Since then, the company has been repositioning itself from a Hadoop-era data platform vendor toward a business built around hybrid data infrastructure and enterprise artificial intelligence. (prnewswire.com) (cloudera.com) The immediate test is whether large customers value fewer upgrades and less data movement more than they value shifting fully to one cloud provider’s stack. Cloudera’s April 8 update is built around the argument that many companies still want both. (cloudera.com)