Our India growth strategy includes both client acquisition and talent expansion: Cloudera’s Abhas Ricky

US-based enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) company Cloudera views India as a crucial growth market, focusing on client acquisition and talent expansion. The company attributes its growth to the rising demand for managing critical applications, the increase in GenAI use cases, and the need for hybrid cloud services in a data-driven environment. During a recent visit to India, Chief Strategy Officer Abhas Ricky discussed Cloudera's strategic plans for the Indian market, and its initiatives in the AI and hybrid cloud space and also addressed how Chief Information Officers (CIOs) can overcome cloud adoption challenges. Edited excerpts:  

How important is the Indian market for Cloudera, and what role does it play in your overall global strategy?

India is a key market for us. It's one of our fastest-growing markets globally, with over 600 employees, demonstrating a significant investment in research and development (R&D) efforts. Our focus lies on the public cloud, enterprise AI, hybrid control plane capabilities, and a new object-store. With a substantial portion of our R&D teams based in India, we are committed to further growth and innovation in the region. Our customer base in India is extensive, particularly in the financial services, public sector, and telecommunications industries. We provide support to major institutions like Axis Bank and Bharti Airtel, as well as to major banks and stock exchanges such as the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE). India plays a crucial role in our global strategy, driving growth and innovation, with a strong emphasis on scale, product feedback, and revenue.

The company had earlier shared its plans to invest significantly over the next two years to expand operations in India. What progress has been made in this area?

We have made significant progress in expanding our presence in India, particularly in R&D, where we've experienced substantial growth. Our field presence has also increased by nearly 50%. In India, we are continuously expanding through strategic partnerships. These include collaborations with the public sector, Reliance Jio Marketplace, Tata Consulting Services, and E&Y. These product partnerships demonstrate our deepened commitment to the region, which we take very seriously. Currently, 80% to 90% of Cloudera's Indian employees are in engineering and Center of Excellence roles, with plans to hire 50 more professionals in FY25.

Can you provide a roadmap for Cloudera in FY25, focusing on the Indian market?

Cloudera's India business has doubled in size over the past few years, boasting an annual growth rate exceeding 100%. This growth trajectory is expected to continue into FY25, with a diverse clientele that includes major banks, stock exchanges, and telecom operators. The strategy will focus on client acquisition and talent expansion.  

What key challenges are Indian CIOs currently facing with cloud adoption, and how can they overcome the existing barriers?

Indeed, CIOs are facing significant challenges with cloud adoption, particularly regarding cost and security. For instance, sectors like banking, telecom, and retail find public cloud workloads prohibitively expensive. Additionally, security and governance complexities are increasing, especially in regulated industries, raising concerns about data control and issues like authorisation and data lineage. According to market research firm IDC, over 90% of global customers have adopted hybrid cloud solutions. In India, while hybrid cloud adoption is growing, many organizations still favour private cloud due to data residency regulations. However, there is a shift toward hybrid solutions as companies are increasingly partnering with trusted vendors for public cloud applications, enhancing agility and market responsiveness.  

What innovations are you planning with AI and GenAI moving forward?

Cloudera's enterprise AI innovation strategy revolves around three key pillars. First, we enable seamless deployment and management of both open-source and proprietary models. Through our partnership with Bedrock, users can leverage models from providers like Cohere and Anthropic with a single click on Cloudera Machine Learning. Our collaboration with Hugging Face further simplifies the process by offering pre-built flow connectors within Cloudera Data Warehouse. We're also expanding our model offerings with upcoming partnerships. The second pillar is hardware acceleration, where we've worked closely with NVIDIA to integrate the Triton library and enhance our hardware capabilities. Lastly, enterprise search is becoming increasingly important, and we've partnered with Pinecone for public cloud implementations. Moving forward, we plan to invest more in the private cloud area and form national partnerships with other database providers to further strengthen our offerings in this space.  

Regarding the new observability offerings for on-premises and public cloud data centres, what are your target verticals, and how can these benefit CIOs?

Observability solutions are essential across various sectors, providing insights into usage patterns and costs to support FinOps capabilities. Cloudera serves 90% of top global insurance firms, 80% of leading banks, and numerous government agencies and telecom companies. For example, Airtel uses a data lake catalogue to manage metadata, improving financial transparency and operational efficiency, which benefits CIOs by enhancing chargeback systems and scalability.  

In June, Cloudera acquired Verta Platform to bet bigger on AI. How will this acquisition give you an edge over your competitors, and are there any other acquisitions planned?

Cloudera's acquisition of Verta Platform is pivotal for advancing its enterprise AI strategy, particularly in hybrid models, enterprise search, and hardware acceleration. Verta's operational AI capabilities will enhance Cloudera's ability to assist clients with model management and deployment in both predictive and generative AI. The platform supports the entire operational stack, facilitating model building, monitoring, and secure scaling. With Verta’s technology, developers can create and optimise business-ready large language models, significantly enhancing Cloudera's enterprise AI platform.