California-based enterprise AI company Cloudera expects its business from India to double in FY25, similar to the performance in the last financial year, the company’s executives told FE in an interaction.
The company helps enterprises process data on any public or private cloud, into valuable and trusted insights. The reason for the growth in India can be attributed to the growing demand of managing critical applications with regard to getting data and analytics, increase in generative AI use cases with data feeding and large language models fine-tuning, need for hybrid cloud services, as well as sovereign data infrastructure.
Globally, the company surpassed the $1 billion revenue mark in FY24. The company did not share specific numbers but sees North America to top revenue share, followed by Europe, Middle East and Asia. From India, Cloudera expects a volume-led growth because of smaller ticket sizes and reluctance of companies to pay higher price for software solutions than markets like North America.
“India is a very important market for us and within Asia one of our fastest growing markets,” Charles Sansbury, chief executive officer of Cloudera, told FE on the sidelines of the Evolve 2024 event.
“My experience is that you get to a point where
North America is 40-50% (of revenue) and then the remainder is split between Europe, Middle East and Asia with Asia, probably being around a quarter of our revenue,” Sansbury added.
In India, the company counts National Stock Exchange (NSE), PhonePe, Bharti Airtel, Axis Bank, among others as its customers.
“We have a very good mix of the core mature businesses in the region plus some very validating kinds of new and emerging companies that are adopting Cloudera,” Sansbury said adding that the opportunity in India is one of the two or three best of any geographies in the world because of kind of the uniqueness of the product fit.
For example, stock exchanges such as NSE process about 20 billion messages a day, and manage about 300 million orders a day. The exchanges are using Cloudera for managing critical data seamlessly.
“These (Cloudera solutions) are not side use cases but critical use cases that are linked with the topline of clients and affect how they serve customers,” said Abhas Ricky, chief strategy officer of the company.
According to Ricky, there is no other product in the market today that can provide companies the scale that Cloudera provides at the price points. Therefore given India’s scale requirements and price sensitive nature of the end consumers, the company’s solutions are a good fit.
Basis the demand in the Indian market, Cloudera is looking to increase its sales and the go-to-market team in a bid to tap more customers and grow revenue.
“We are talking about adding headcount in India. From a company perspective, that’s a very large office for us in Bengaluru in terms of developers and support. Even the sales organisation, we’re talking about increasing capacity by about 10-20% next year. We have a strong sales leader there and it’s led to our growth,” said Frank O’Dowd, chief revenue officer at Cloudera.
With regard to the product development team in India, the company has 600 people and about 40-50 people in the go-to-market team.
Cloudera currently has its team in Chennai and Bengaluru for product development. From Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, the company manages its commercial operations. “We will expand our headcount certainly within those regions. I don’t know that we’re going to open additional satellite offices but it kind of depends on demand and what the market does,” Sansbury said.
Besides the private companies, Cloudera is also seeing traction from the government departments as well in the country which are also investing on data experiences, said Remus Lim, senior vice president, Asia Pacific & Japan.
At a time when companies are leveraging generative AI, data management is critical to train their models right and also leverage better data insights to tap end-users. On Wednesday, Cloudera also introduced accelerators for machine learning projects (AMPs) for enterprises to help with rapid application development. This includes a pre-built framework by Cloudera on chatbots, fine-tuning of models, prompt engineering, among others, and organisations can then build on top of that.
On whether AI model hallucinations can reduce with fine-tune models, Priyank Patel, vice-president of product management said, “the performance or the quality of the model posts, fine tuning for a particular task has shown improvements across a variety of use cases”.
Currently, besides data management Cloudera has developed products such as automatic AI assistants for their users, as well as coding assistants for automating the processes by the companies. On jobs scenario with regard to software developers going forward, Venkat Rajaji, senior vice president, product development, said, “AI is going to help them accelerate and make their jobs easier, make them more productive and probably churnout innovation faster”.
(The correspondent is in Singapore at the invitation of Cloudera)
