Cloudera bets on 'anywhere cloud for AI' at EVOLVE26

Cloudera started out in the Hadoop market and later moved to a unified data layer spanning clouds and on-premises infrastructure. At EVOLVE26, the company's pitch has shifted again, toward what Paul Gillin called an "anywhere cloud for AI." That framing builds on a preference Gillin says big companies settled on long ago: not wanting to be beholden to a single cloud provider.

Gillin, enterprise editor of SiliconANGLE Media, spoke with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight during an exclusive broadcast at the event. He drew a distinction between general-purpose agents, which he described as more of a consumer phenomenon and an office worker tool, and Cloudera's agents, which he said are tuned to managing data and workloads and optimizing GPU capacity. In his view, simply having an agent is no longer an edge, which is why the company is doubling down on its multiplatform play.

The keynote also touched on sovereign and private AI. Gillin cited surveys pointing to regulation as the main reason enterprises want to keep AI inside their own walls, and said open-weight models give them a way to do it, having grown from about 20% of token use two years ago to more than 80% today. Before trusting that pitch, he added, CIOs will want to know how agents are controlled, what audit trails they leave behind, and how agent decisions can be documented for regulators — an area he described as still a "wild west."