Not your father’s Cloudera

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This week on Federal Tech Talk, host John Gilroy interviewed Henry Sowell, CIO of Cloudera Government Solutions. Cloudera has had a strong federal presence since 2012 when one of the founders, Mike Olson, was a guest on Federal TechTalk.

Since that auspicious interview, Cloudera has changed from being a startup to a rather large organization with over 3,000 employees. The company initially used an open-source project called Hadoop to assist agencies in getting a better handle on what was called “Big Data.”

Today, Cloudera still has expertise in Hadoop but it has so much more to offer federal technology leaders. Sowell explained that Cloudera now has expanded into giving federal agencies more control over the system challenges of today.

For example, one game-changing capability is data streaming in the federal government.  Henry stated that a recent study shows 82% of federal agencies are using or considering real-time information and streaming data.

This concept makes sense in the commercial world – think of the millions of dollars of trades that take place on Wall Street every day.  Data streaming is essential there, but also can meet life or death situations on the battlefield. The DoD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) is looking at streaming data for many varying applications.

If you are managing a portfolio for a federal agency and are considering adding streaming data capabilities, then this interview is a great start.