I worked at Cloudera in the early 2010s, before they went IPO. It's a bit sad to see the way things played out. All I can say is, it was a fun ride while it lasted.
Cloudera actually started in the cloud, but quickly moved to selling mostly on-premise software. Back then, cloud was a lot less cost competitive (it still is not really cost competitive) https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
The on-premise business had much higher margins, which kind of "took the oxygen out of the room" for the cloud side of the business. In retrospect, neglecting the cloud market was a big mistake, of course.
Cloudera management knew even back then that Hadoop was eventually going to be superseded by a newer technology. We tried to build that technology, in the form of Impala, an optimized SQL query engine. Unfortunately, it never really took off in the marketplace, for several reasons. For one, its dialect of SQL was not compatible with Hive, the traditional SQL frontend for Hadoop. For another, early versions of Impala were somewhat unstable, and didn't have the fault-tolerance of traditional Hadoop tools.
From my perspective, the main issue that cloud solves is that managing the server side stuff is really hard, and requires experts. Cloud also aligns expectations: it's really clear to both customer and vendor that a cloud contract is not a stepping stone towards self-managing. Unfortunately, Cloudera just didn't see the shift towards cloud coming, and they're now paying the price.
Cloudera actually started in the cloud, but quickly moved to selling mostly on-premise software. Back then, cloud was a lot less cost competitive (it still is not really cost competitive) https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap... The on-premise business had much higher margins, which kind of "took the oxygen out of the room" for the cloud side of the business. In retrospect, neglecting the cloud market was a big mistake, of course.
Cloudera management knew even back then that Hadoop was eventually going to be superseded by a newer technology. We tried to build that technology, in the form of Impala, an optimized SQL query engine. Unfortunately, it never really took off in the marketplace, for several reasons. For one, its dialect of SQL was not compatible with Hive, the traditional SQL frontend for Hadoop. For another, early versions of Impala were somewhat unstable, and didn't have the fault-tolerance of traditional Hadoop tools.
From my perspective, the main issue that cloud solves is that managing the server side stuff is really hard, and requires experts. Cloud also aligns expectations: it's really clear to both customer and vendor that a cloud contract is not a stepping stone towards self-managing. Unfortunately, Cloudera just didn't see the shift towards cloud coming, and they're now paying the price.