TheCUBE analyst Dave Vellante sits down with Leo Brunnick, chief product officer at Cloudera, after a high-energy day in New York for Cloudera EVOLVE25 that isn't slowing down just yet. Private equity backing is accelerating product bets and “data anywhere powers AI everywhere,” according to Brunnick says. He breaks down Data Services 2.0 and a usability-first push, tying recent moves like Octopai and Taikun to a cloud-like experience on-prem or across hyperscalers with the same code.
The conversation highlights how enterprises are navigating hybrid data realities to make AI practical. An oil and gas company combines edge processing with centralized analytics to predict equipment failures, saving billions, Brunnick notes. Pharmaceutical firms are also accelerating discovery by applying governed data patterns. Cloudera’s latest survey shows 52% of enterprises report measurable AI value, while McKinsey estimates about 30% of inference will remain on-prem. Edge-to-AI momentum is also growing through technologies like NiFi and Flink, alongside early experiments with small models at the edge. The goal is to enable faster partnering and “yes-and” integrations that balance innovation, control and cost, Brunnick emphasizes.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Cloudera EVOLVE 2025. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For Cloudera EVOLVE 2025
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for Cloudera EVOLVE 2025.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Cloudera EVOLVE 2025. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to Cloudera EVOLVE 2025
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to Cloudera EVOLVE 2025. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Leo Brunnick, Cloudera
TheCUBE analyst Dave Vellante sits down with Leo Brunnick, chief product officer at Cloudera, after a high-energy day in New York for Cloudera EVOLVE25 that isn't slowing down just yet. Private equity backing is accelerating product bets and “data anywhere powers AI everywhere,” according to Brunnick says. He breaks down Data Services 2.0 and a usability-first push, tying recent moves like Octopai and Taikun to a cloud-like experience on-prem or across hyperscalers with the same code.
The conversation highlights how enterprises are navigating hybrid data realities to make AI practical. An oil and gas company combines edge processing with centralized analytics to predict equipment failures, saving billions, Brunnick notes. Pharmaceutical firms are also accelerating discovery by applying governed data patterns. Cloudera’s latest survey shows 52% of enterprises report measurable AI value, while McKinsey estimates about 30% of inference will remain on-prem. Edge-to-AI momentum is also growing through technologies like NiFi and Flink, alongside early experiments with small models at the edge. The goal is to enable faster partnering and “yes-and” integrations that balance innovation, control and cost, Brunnick emphasizes.
TheCUBE analyst Dave Vellante sits down with Leo Brunnick, chief product officer at Cloudera, after a high-energy day in New York for Cloudera EVOLVE25 that isn't slowing down just yet. Private equity backing is accelerating product bets and “data anywhere powers AI everywhere,” according to Brunnick says. He breaks down Data Services 2.0 and a usability-first push, tying recent moves like Octopai and Taikun to a cloud-like experience on-prem or across hyperscalers with the same code.
The conversation highlights how enterprises are navigating hybrid ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What is Cloudera's position in the data and AI markets, and how is the company planning to move forward?add
What has been the impact of investment strategies on the business, particularly in relation to shareholder returns and market conditions?add
What changes have been made by Cloudera in terms of usability and user experience?add
>> We're back in New York City, wrapping up the day here at Cloudera EVOLVE. My name's Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of that event, big customer event. Probably the biggest of all the world tours that Cloudera does. Really excited to have Leo Brunnick here. He's the chief product officer at Cloudera. We're going to get into it, get into the product and the trends and what you guys are doing. Good to see you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Leo Brunnick
>> Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Dave Vellante
>> So, good day.
Leo Brunnick
>> It was really good.
Dave Vellante
>> A lot of good customers here.
Leo Brunnick
>> A lot of good energy, a lot of good energy, a lot of great customer stories. It was fun.
Dave Vellante
>> So, you and Charles, your paths have crossed over the years. Give us a little background on the journey that got you to Cloudera.
Leo Brunnick
>> Yeah, so I know Charles from a previous generation of technology, so there was a company called Vignette. I think probably anybody over 45 anyway remembers Vignette.
Dave Vellante
>> I remember them. Sure.
Leo Brunnick
>> Late '90s and early 2000s. And Charles was the chief financial officer there when I was the chief product officer there. So, great run there. We each went our own career directions, staying in software, the both of us. And he called me up late last year and said, "I need you on my team." So, I was happy to come.
Dave Vellante
>> So, what brought you here, other than Charles?
Leo Brunnick
>> So, you need a handful of things because when you choose a company, you only do that half a dozen times in your life and it's the single most important decision you make because it's where you're putting all your time and the only thing you can't get back. And for me, the followings have to be true. Number one, you have to believe in the leadership and management. In other words, that's a combination of both vision and their ability to get it done. And Charles has proven that multiple times. He's had multiple successful exits, but I also got to meet some of the other people on his team, some that I knew of and some that I didn't and judge it was a great team. The second thing you have to have, you have to be in a market that has tailwinds instead of headwinds. Clearly, that's this space because Cloudera is in the data space and at least, I would say, not in the center of the AI market, but certainly on the side of the stream, right? Because we have our own AI studios and et cetera. Where we're in the center of stream is the best data management company in history. So, that's good. And then, on the third thing, you need to have capital to make the dream come true. And I spoke to members of the ownership, the private equity companies that own this company and they were clearly gung-ho on trying to invest in the company and move forward. And that has been true in spades over the past year. I mean the acquiring companies and increasing budgets. And we're out there hiring like mad in all the cities I have engineering people. So, it was a kind of easy choice.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, private equity's gone through quite a transformation in the last decade, hasn't it?
Leo Brunnick
>> Yes, it has.
Dave Vellante
>> It's gone from squeezing as much cash out of the business as possible. That still happens, but I think they realize, "Wow, if you invest with valuations, especially when you're in a kind bubble-icious environment, that actually you can give a lot greater return for your shareholders." So, what's that experience been like? It's been pretty positive, it sounds.
Leo Brunnick
>> Yeah, we are owned by two great firms, KKR and CDNR. And I've had the opportunity to meet with them together and to meet with them separately in their operating groups. And they see it. They're bullish about this. It's why they invested a few years ago and they see it even more now. If anything, the market has swung Cloudera's way since they made that investment. And that's even less about what the market's actually doing and more about the perception of the market because if you go back it's five, six years ago even it was everything's going to the cloud forever and ever. Amen. Only some legacy stuff's going to stay behind. And then, in the course of the past year, suddenly everyone's saying, "Hey, the data center is just sexy again. 40%, 50%, those kind of numbers are going to be on-prem because of security, because of regulation, because of sovereignty, because of escalating costs." And that is just a very different tune, even than it was three years ago. So, where they were excited to come in and work with Cloudera as it was, they can see the opportunity getting bigger instead of smaller as they've owned it, and they're really leaning into that.
Dave Vellante
>> So, as a product pro, you obviously looked at the portfolio, what about that portfolio attracted you? What were maybe some of the exciting areas that you would want to work on, whether it's through M&A, you made some several strategic acquisitions or organic efforts?
Leo Brunnick
>> So, what Cloudera has going for it, like I said, some of the greatest experts in data in the world, like data products. So, we got people whether they've been in the business for five years or been in the business for 25 years, are really the world experts at the different layers of having to manage a big hunk of data. And at each one of the products that makes up our platform, we have some of the world's best here. It doesn't take long to figure that out. You can go look online and see who works where and who's committing these different things into open source projects. So, clearly, great technology. What I was excited about is that the company has been striving for a number of years to move into the cloud native work and that involves something that we call data services, but it's that stuff that's contained and dropped into the public cloud like it's supposed to. And what I could see by talking to the leadership was that they had gotten most of the way there and not quite finished the job and they had just acquired Berta when I was talking to Charles and moving them really fast and ahead in the AI studio space. They had just like five minutes before acquired Octopai, which was all about a lineage product that would help Cloudera take their data fabric to the next level. And they were already doing marketplace diligence to find the final layer, which is this a Kubernetes company if you will, the containerization company called Taikun and that closed in July. And it was pretty obvious that with all the things they'd done organically and add those three things in, they really end up with something that's undeniably magic. It's all the data governance and things that they were all so good at made modern by Octopai, put together with the data and now full AI suite that they'd already been putting in containers and wrap that in Taikun and do it well. It's going to be shocking, right? Nobody else on the planet is putting together this encapsulated thing that sits on-prem with a cloud-like experience and sits in any one of the hyperscalers. Any one of them, exact same piece of code. And on the other side of that, the amount of speed, the amount of innovation, the amount of partnering that Cloudera can do, it's an order of magnitude difference.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, you've got basically most of the pieces that you would need for that big data layer to build applications or inject intelligence into applications. 2021 we coined the term super cloud, which is this abstraction layer, which is identical experience, whether it's in the cloud, across clouds, on-prem, at the edge and that's exactly what you're describing. Explain from your perspective why that's important and necessary for AI?
Leo Brunnick
>> So, a couple of things. Number one, for AI to be built right and trained, it has to be built and trained against as much relevant data as possible. When it comes to your private data, the stuff that's your crown jewels, right? The public data is every LLM's already consumed exactly the same stuff, right? When it comes to your private data, you want it consuming all of your data and your data is an all in one place period. I haven't met a single one of our large customers who has a data state that is pure. It's not that not all on-prem anymore. They're not all in a single cloud. In other words, they have a complex data state. It's lots of different places in lots of different formats, some of which is properly organized and situated, some of which is not, some of which is out on cloud, some of which they have to go discover and figure out where it is. It's a messy estate. And no business unit now wants to wait for you to fix that before they start using AI to keep up with their peers. It's an existential fear that unless they do it now they're going to fall behind. So, they're starting on AI. It might not be good, that's scary. It might not work, that's unfortunate, but they're starting now anyway. So, if you're in charge of data, you're like, "Wait, give us three more years and we'll be fully on Amazon." Nobody cares. Nobody cares anymore. And so, you now have, whether you meant to or not, a hybrid data estate and you've got to control it and you've got to manage it. And forget just chatbots and smart answers, you're about to train your new employees, which are agents, in this data. And what you're essentially saying is, "Well, we got some of the data. So, I guess they'll have some of the information and they'll make some good decisions." That's a terrible way to end up. So, we think it's a pretty strong place to be in the hybrid data and AI management.
Dave Vellante
>> What are some of the more advanced use cases that you're seeing for that kind of capability that you guys are providing? What's exciting you out there?
Leo Brunnick
>> Well, we have a couple of customers that are truly on the cutting edge. One, we have an oil and gas company, who is doing really smart collection of information, internet-of-things all around the world. Not just on laptops, but a piece of machinery throughout factories and refineries and et cetera. That is taking in sensor readings, taking in vibrational readings, taking in any number of things. And then, they are doing predictive analysis and other kinds of things using AI. Pretty straightforward stuff when you think about it. They models themselves, but the way that they're doing some stuff out at the edge, some of the processing out at the edge, some of the stuff then being transformed and processed inside. And the way they're combining this to really be best I've ever seen at figuring out when a piece of equipment might go down based on what it's doing. And let's just say that it starts with a B, the amount of money they believe they've saved in just the last three or four years running that solution. And then, I mean, I couldn't even begin to do justice to some of the stories I've heard in the last two days from our pharmaceutical companies. They're doing some just remarkable things out there on coming up with things that are most likely to be combined with other things that could attack, diseases that are out there now that no one understands and realizes. I mean, just mind-blowing, life-saving stuff.
Dave Vellante
>> Not to mention just the productivity impact that Brian from AbbVie was talking about today. It takes 12 to 14 years to get a new drug out. It's $4 to $6 billion. You got to test the molecules, the complexity of it all. 250,000 employee hours saved. I mean these are hard dollars. So, that's something that's pretty interesting. Can you explain, I think it was your chief strategy officer this morning, Abhas, he was talking about, I think it was McKinsey data. He said, "About 30% of AI is going to be inference on-prem." And I said, "Well, I actually think there's going to be more AI inferencing at the edge and that's going to be an enormous business." Can you talk about your edge play?
Leo Brunnick
>> Yeah, so we use fun phrases like edge to AI when we talk about our planning for that, but we do a lot of work out at the edge. We have our streaming business, which is NiFi, Flink, Kafka. We use Minify, which is out at the very edge, which is the lightweight version of NiFi. And then, we work together with one of our largest partners together, build some various converters, if you will, Sparkplug and Mini Sparkplug adapters on these connectors in order to start doing really interesting small language model processing out on the edge. And really early days on that stuff. I mean I don't think anybody even can say where the market's going to go on that, but we think in the long run, you're actually doing some level of artificial intelligence work, whether it's agents, whether it's some level of inferencing that you're going to be doing it in all sorts of places that all of this, "Hey, bring it back here to where the data isn't crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, and then we'll go out and do actions." It's going to become less and less like that. I don't think we have yet begun to understand how things are about to change in that regard.
Dave Vellante
>> So, you guys have put out a survey, I think it came out today, 52% out of the state of enterprise AI survey respondents say they're significantly successful in realizing measurable value with AI initiatives. So, that doesn't really square with the MIT circle, but that's okay. I mean I think that's probably more accurate. I think the MIT study was misrepresented in the press, but go ahead. You have a thought on that.
Leo Brunnick
>> It's interesting, obviously, I like our survey because I certainly know where it came from. I wonder if we are giving too bad a name to success criteria. It's supposed to be the case that with new technology you're trying, trying, trying. And you're supposed to figure out quickly if it's going in the right direction, the fail fast kind of thing.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, don't go down that path. It didn't work before.
Leo Brunnick
>> And you actually do want to fund a whole bunch of cheap things in order to go try and then kill them as fast as you can, and then go down the most likely path. When it comes to artificial intelligence, we know so much less than we're going to in six months or six years. So, I don't think a rapid early-failure rate is a significant finding really at all.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And then, the other piece, obviously, private cloud, hybrid clouds dominate. Andy Jassy would even agree with that because he's got a different vision about the fullness and time where stuff ends up, but I think it's pretty clear that the world is hybrid. Although, it's really not a zero-sum game. I mean it's just like the TAM is enormous. I mean people are going to put data in the cloud, they're going to put data on-prem, they're going to put data at the edge. Data's everywhere, to your point.
Leo Brunnick
>> Data is everywhere. And we say now data anywhere, right? We say data anywhere is going to power AI everywhere. And it's a little clever turn of phrase, but it's so true. It's absolutely so true. You're not going to be able to get all your stuff the way you wish you would've had it if you had started over. And we had heard someone on the stage today, "Think about AI as a brand new thing. Imagine if you were starting over." But unfortunately, companies can't start over. They have to start from where they are. And one of the single things creating an enterprise value for them is the unique data that they have that nobody else has and they've got to leverage that. And we see that with some of the service companies. ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce, that all application companies-
Dave Vellante
>> Palantir....
Leo Brunnick
>> that are trying to become data companies.
Dave Vellante
>> ServiceNow, right?
Leo Brunnick
>> Everybody gets that-
Dave Vellante
>> Data Cloud, Salesforce's Data Cloud, and what are they doing? We just had Richard and Brian, Brian from AbbVie and Richard, and they're talking about their nonprofit that they're doing. They're talking about harmonizing data, they're talking about knowledge graphs, they're talking about building things, the people, places and things that world understand, versus the strings that database understands. I'm like, "You guys are talking about the future." So, from a product standpoint, how do you think about evolving the platform to accommodate that digital representation of the enterprise? What do you need to do to do that?
Leo Brunnick
>> So, one of the things I'm happiest about, and this is an inflection point that Cloudera is bringing itself to, look, Cloudera has always been great at managing data. The most secure and most fast and most speeds and feeds and great technology. It has never prioritized usability. It's not been at the top of its thing. It's like the engineer's building a product and the best engineers in the world. But what has fundamentally changed there in 2025 is usability at the UI level, usability at the user experience level, meaning how many clicks does it take? And what do I do? User experience at the IT team, keeping something running, usability at the install and upgrade. All of those levels being addressed simultaneously. Some of it was a couple of acquisitions and some of it was just internal prioritization. We announced today our data services 2.0 strategy. On the other side of that, we gain something that we've never had before and that's nimbleness. We get to be nimble. And I was talking with AWS a minute ago, our ability to partner with them and any one of their partners changes by an order of magnitude on the other side, because we can just do a lot of yes-and, yes-and, yes-and. When you have the true cloud experience anywhere, there's a reason that they say, incorrectly, "All innovation happens on the cloud." That's become a saying in the last few years. And it's because it's very difficult, unless you're in one of the hyperscalers, to attract so many individual startups who, frankly, have to start there. And we are turning that's on its head by allowing a whole bunch of partners, we announced several of them today, to work with us in an on-prem or cloud fashion and I think it's going to be a game-changer.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, I mean to your point about proprietary data, that exists, that's why George Gilbert and I wrote a piece entitled Why Jamie Dimon is Sam Altman's Biggest Competitor because Jamie Dimon is a metaphor for an enterprise. They've got all that proprietary data and he's never going to leak it into the public domain. But yeah, I mean you announced, let's see, I think ServiceNow Fundamental, Paul Scalileo I think were some new partners today to add to-
Leo Brunnick
>> A lot of exciting partners coming along. And I've heard it from a number of customers today. I've heard it from a number of the meetings that I've been in the last few weeks preparing for this. Cloudera has a new message, but also, a little bit of new excitement and energy and buzz. It's been a few minutes since we've been this excited.
Dave Vellante
>> Spring in the step, Leo.
Leo Brunnick
>> There you go.
Dave Vellante
>> Thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate your time.
Leo Brunnick
>> Thank you, Dave.
Dave Vellante
>> Okay, thank you for watching. This wraps up Cloudera EVOLVE theCUBE's coverage. Go to thecube.net, you'll see all this on-demand. siliconangle.com have all the news. Thecuberesearch.com for all the deep dives. And don't forget to check out thecubeai.com, ask your questions, what were the top five takeaways from Cloudera EVOLVE? That will all be up there and ingested tonight. Thank you so much for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE team. Thank you, Cloudera. Great set here. Awesome venue. We'll see you next time on theCUBE.
Dave Vellante