Recently, NGDATA announced a partnership with Cloudera and that our Lily solution was certified in the CDH4 platform. We recently sat down with Tim Stevens of Cloudera to talk about all things Big Data and more specifically to get his insights around the value of this partnership to the industry, how and why it will impact enterprise organizations and some of the challenges that still exist for organizations looking to better take advantage of their own Big Data.
Q: Hi Tim, thanks for joining us and if you don’t mind, tell us briefly about your role at Cloudera
A: As VP of Business and Corporate Development, my role is to drive business development, strategic partnership initiatives and market growth strategies for Cloudera. I work directly with our entire ecosystem of partners– which includes hardware partners, software partners, application partners, resellers and system integrators.
Q: What made NGDATA appealing as a partner and what value does Cloudera and its customers derive from the pairing?
A: Our goal at Cloudera is to build and deliver the world’s biggest and best enterprise-grade Big Data platform. However, we do not build the applications or tools that run on top of our platform. Rather, we make it available to organizations to build tools and applications for business intelligence and data analytics to run on top of Cloudera platform.
NGDATA was a good fit, for a number of reasons. As we were out visiting our own customers, we noticed that many of them had mentioned NGDATA and its consumer intelligence solution, Lily. Most of these customers had already been using Lily or were in the process of talking to NGDATA about investing in the solution to run on top of our CDH4 platform. As a result, our teams started to work together to develop solutions for joint customers.
Q: What was attractive about the Lily solution?
A: First, we loved that our customers were coming to us and sharing their own positive experiences with Lily. That is always the single most important piece of validation. However, as we started to dive deeper into the technology, we continued to be more impressed with what it could do. Lily helps enterprise organizations gain valuable insights into their customers by combining internal and external structured and unstructured data —from point of sale (POS) systems, enterprise applications, social media sites and more –into one platform, making consumer insights actionable for businesses.
What this means is that enterprises like banks and retailers can create more customized and personal interactions and offers for customers – in real-time. They can also get a leg up on competition by identifying key business trends before their competitors.
Customers really like the way Lily is optimized for vertical markets and how easy it is to use across functions of an organization. It is easy to access, and analyzing customer information can be done in a matter of minutes.
Q: What are the advantages of the partnership?
A: As I mentioned earlier, Cloudera is focused on building and delivering the biggest and best enterprise-class Big Data platform. By working directly with companies like NGDATA, we can jointly develop integrated solutions that help companies get a handle on the data driven enterprise. NGDATA is one of the first companies to distinguish itself in the vast Big Data landscape and provide real insights around the data being created in the enterprise. It’s not just about transactional data anymore, it is much bigger. Simply put, Cloudera makes sense of the data and NGDATA makes it actionable for our customers.
Q: What challenges still exist in the market when it comes to Big Data? Opportunities?
A: The Big Data market continues to grow exponentially. New players are entering the market and there are billions of data points created each day. This becomes a challenge for enterprise organizations to navigate when it comes to making decisions around their own Big Data strategies.
However, as the technology becomes more sophisticated – yet easier to use – it no longer takes a PhD to figure out how to access, analyze and make data actionable. With partnerships like Cloudera and NGDATA, we are removing the complexity for these organizations and providing them with a real time Big Data solution that helps improve customer relationships and loyalty.
