It has been a little over a year since Charles Sansbury (pictured) was appointed chief executive officer of Cloudera Inc., and it didn’t take him long to figure out that the AI experience would be his customers’ and his company’s focus after taking the helm at the data management and analytics firm.

Charles Sansbury, CEO at Cloudera, talks with theCUBE about his company’s AI experience.

“Since I’ve joined, [artificial intelligence] has become the absolute topic,” Sansbury said. “We’ve been doing what used to be called machine learning-based models for customers for 10 years. As compute has gotten faster and access to data has gotten greater, machine learning has evolved into what we call AI today, but it moved to one of our strengths.”

Sansbury spoke with theCUBE Research’s Bob Laliberte and co-host Rebecca Knight at the Cloudera Evolve24 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Cloudera’s priorities and a new collaboration with Nvidia Corp. (* Disclosure below.)

Support for rapid return on the AI experience

After joining Cloudera last year, Sansbury embarked on a tour to meet with customers and learn more about their business needs. Not surprisingly, AI was top-of-mind for Cloudera’s clients around the world.

“I heard every customer talk about the importance of AI and investing aggressively for it,” Sansbury recalled. “And then I heard, ‘But the folks who approve my investment, my board of directors, they want a return quickly … what are the quick wins that we can get in terms of applications or use cases?’ I think we’re a pretty important part of the ecosystem, and it’s establishing what those use cases are and then broadcasting it to customers, how they can get those quick wins.”

Customer requirements have led Cloudera to focus on three major priorities over the past 12 months, according to Sansbury. These include helping companies manage workloads across public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructures, and facilitating the combination of data silos into a common data pool. Cloudera has also been working with customers to operationalize AI to enhance their AI experience.

“We are not building large language models; that is not what we do,” Sansbury said. “But we are providing the infrastructure and capabilities to make data available and appropriately structured to feed and train models. And then we’re helping customers evaluate the performance of those models and deploy those models, which is a critical part of the ecosystem in helping companies realize AI.”

To help support customers in AI deployment, Cloudera just announced a joint effort with Nvidia for an AI inference service that will boost [large language model] performance by 36 times. Nvidia’s NIM microservices will power Cloudera AI’s ability to streamline deployment and management of large-scale AI models.

“Nvidia spent lots of time trying to basically improve performance, and they’ve made incredible results,” Sansbury said. “Generative AI at scale will be deployed by the world’s largest companies on on-premises hardware because of cost, because of manageability [and] because of security issues, and they effectively are going to bring those LLMs to the data as opposed to moving the data to the models. What that means is those companies are going to have to have their own compute and they want to be able to use it in the most efficient way.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Cloudera Evolve24 event:

(* Disclosure: Cloudera Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cloudera nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE