Francisco Mateo-Sidrón (Cloudera): "Companies must organize their AI developments around data and not the other way around"

Nov. 25 (Portaltic/EP) –

The repatriation of data, investments in ‘on premise’ and quantum computing are some of the trends that will mark the cloud services and data management sector in the coming years, which join artificial intelligence (AI) and the weight that data has in the quality of the tools based on this technology.

Cloudera will hold a new edition of EVOLVE24 in Madrid on December 10, one of the main events in the field of AI and data, where you can learn about strategies to accelerate the implementation of enterprise AI and improve productivity in the era of Generative AI, as well as the evolution of the hybrid cloud.

“It will be the perfect closing to a year full of progress and successes,” anticipates the head of Cloudera’s Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, Francisco Mateo-Sidrón, who points out that real cases have already been seen. and success in events held in Dubai, Milan and Paris.

In Madrid, 300 data management executives will participate, joining Cloudera’s top executives, clients, partners and other experts. Speakers include Chad Foster, businessman and author of the book ‘Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary’; R ‘Ray’ Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research; and the former Secretary of State for Digitalization and AI and current co-chair of the United Nations Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas.

“Our goal is to focus on the main trends in AI and the future of data, in addition to telling real experiences from the most avant-garde companies,” explains Mateo-Sidrón in an interview with Europa Press.

Artificial intelligence has burst into the digitalization of companies and public administrations in recent years, but, as he underlines, “what we must be clear about is that they must organize their AI developments around data and not the other way around.”

“Managing the data correctly and governing it establishes the foundations for innovation, differentiation in the market as a competitive advantage and encourages decision-making based on reliable, proprietary and quality information,” asserts the manager.

AI can automate data collection or validation tasks, optimize data storage, and analyze historical data to transform it into useful business insights to support decision making.

“The success of these tools comes from the quality and reliability of the data” provided to the models for training, since “incorrect, biased or incomplete data can lead to hallucinations”, that is, the results misleading or false information generated by an AI.

And vice versa, the executive emphasizes that “AI algorithms can help improve data quality, identifying patterns and detecting errors when we are working with very large sets.”

CLOUDERA PLATFORM

At the beginning of the year, Cloudera announced the opening of offices in Europe, located in Madrid, Paris and Milan. “These offices are part of our growth, which allows us to continue building on these successes and continue working closely with our clients and partners to transform any type of data into valuable information regardless of where they are hosted.”

Cloudera offers “the only truly hybrid platform” for data management in all types of environments, as it “allows companies to access all their data and analyze it in multiple public and private clouds, as well as on premise,” explains the executive.

The digitalization of companies took them first to the cloud, which “provides a lot of flexibility in the management of workloads that were unmanageable on premise”, but is not always the answer to their needs, “for reasons of costs, governance or sovereignty”.

Mateo-Sidrón cites the results of the EVOLVE23 report, which shows that 72 percent of Spanish IT directors surveyed plan to repatriate some of their data to the ‘on premise’ in the next three years, compared to 94 percent who will continue to migrate more data to the cloud.

“We are seeing that the concept of hybrid data is the most flexible for all scenarios,” and in this context, data architectures such as ‘data lakehouse’ and ‘data mesh’ stand out, because “they allow different scenarios: on premise, cloud private and public cloud. And platforms like Cloudera “allow management of all of them from the same point.”

A ‘datalakehouse’ is a management system to store, process and analyze large volumes of data, while the ‘data mesh’ allows the ownership of data to be decentralized between the different areas of a company, making it more accessible to business users. .

The platform also integrates Apache Iceberg, as part of the company’s strategy in favor of ‘open source’, which simplifies data processing when large volumes are managed. “Customers increasingly demand interoperability with multiple formats, more engines and an open data lakehouse addresses these problems from the core of the business,” says the company’s head of EMEA.

“Over time, it has been proven that Cloudera is one of the main actors in this open source project and we have the entire open source community behind us, so innovation is constant.”

TENDENCIES

Looking to the future, Mateo-Sidrón believes that data repatriation is a trend that will be constantly talked about. Specifically, “the control of information, privacy and intellectual property of this data are going to be the key to this paradigm shift.”

This will lead to an increase in investments in ‘on premise’, since with this modality, “companies have more security and control, guaranteeing that the proprietary code and project information remain within a protected environment.”

Interest in sovereign cloud solutions is also growing, although in this case, Mateo-Sidrón points out that the repatriation of data is leading in many cases to a reflection on how to carry out hybrid strategies.

2025 will also be a “crucial year to know if artificial intelligence succeeds or fails”, since customers will try to make this technology “truly at their service.” “Before jumping the gun, companies should determine to what level AI can improve their products and services, and whether it can be done safely.”

In this framework, the revolution will come through agentic AI and its ability to perform complex simulations, which will help organizations plan, test and optimize their activities faster, offering useful information in real time.

Finally, the manager mentions quantum computing, which, in his opinion, “will eclipse AI as the next great technological revolution.” “A sign of this is that all types of companies are investing in new generation data centers with the capacity to offer specialized infrastructure for quantum systems,” he concludes.