With IT spending set to surge and demand for digital transformation booming in Asia Pacific, Tech Data and Cloudera have been steadily expanding their partnership in recent years in hopes of banking on the upward trend.
The two entities have been working together for over six years, with Bennett Wong, Tech Data’s VP of Advanced Solutions in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) finding the collaborative journey “extremely fulfilling”.
Channel Asia spoke with Wong and Remus Lim, VP of APJ at Cloudera to find out how the long-standing partnership has progressed since they launched the vendor’s data platform at Tech Data’s APAC centre of excellence (CoE) last year.
“In our perspective, over the last six years we have learnt how to work together to offer the support to enable our business partners' success, and in turn, how our business partners can deliver success to their end-users,” Wong told Channel Asia.
“The approach is coming together as strategic partners with like-minded thinking to create resources to help the partner ecosystem. In fact, the existing synergy between the two organisations has played a key role in better understanding Tech Data’s CoE capabilities and how to improve on them, resulting in the current partnership.”
The launch of the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) last year was done with the aim of supporting the endless demand for hybrid cloud capabilities – and of course to serve partners and customers better.
“Through this partnership, our partners – especially the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) – get a strong foothold to extend and enhance their capabilities in terms of expertise and geographies,” Wong said.
“The training component of the partnership is designed to reduce the challenges related to enterprise infrastructure for our partners – and make it easier for them to adopt the cloud.”
Cloudera’s Remus Lim echoed Wong and shared their aligned focus on enabling partners in the region.
“Our goal was to work with Tech Data to provide an end-to-end guided approach that business partners can turn to drive growth through enablement, technology innovation, and market-ready solutions,” said Lim. “To do that, we had to ensure that we had a demo environment with relevant solutions for all our customers across APAC.
“Identifying the desired outcomes for the centre and the benefits that we wanted our customers to enjoy from using the centre provided clarity and an overall direction to work towards. Though it was a lengthy process, we wanted to ensure that we had the right information that would be beneficial to our diverse group of customers.”
Zoning in on Asia
What’s more, their shared interests and investment in the APJ market is timely, given its sheer revenue potential. According to a 2022 International Data Corporation (IDC) report, ICT spending was set to grow by over 3.8 per cent in 2022 and is expected to reach US$1.4 trillion by 2026 with a compounded annual growth (CAGR) of 5.2 per cent by the end of 2026.
IDC also found that across APAC, enterprise technology spending, including service providers, will continue to remain strong despite attempts to “protect IT budgets”.
The findings also follow an earlier report by the analyst firm which found that revenues for big data and business analytics solutions were expected to reach US$27 billion in APAC by 2022.
This is why Wong hopes having Cloudera on board at their CoE would strengthen the distributor’s ongoing APAC strategy.
“As Cloudera is represented across all Tech Data entities in APJ, our approach is to provide our business partners with an interest in building a data analytics offering on Cloudera, regardless of their skill level and maturity,” said Wong.
“In addition, we foresee the Cloudera partnership giving a further boost to our Malaysia and Hong Kong presence, which has grown significantly following Tech Data’s acquisition of Innovix Distribution. We are also looking forward to further growth in Japan.”
Banking on edge spending
In addition to the optimistic growth outlook on Asia, the partners have also zero-ed in on another business opportunity around edge solutions – their latest venture involves helping customers address data in motion gaps.
With this solution, Tech Data will leverage Cloudera’s real-time insights to enable enterprises to spot any issues and securely manage their entire data lifecycle with greater flexibility from the edge to AI.
Cloudera will provide two core services through its Data-In-Motion offering: DataFlow and Stream Processing. The former is said to enable developers to connect any data source anywhere with any structure, process it, and deliver it to any destination using a low-code authoring experience. Meanwhile the latter offers users an enterprise-grade stream management and stateful processing solution.
The service comes at a time when worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to be US$208 billion in 2023 – an increase of 13.1 per cent over 2022 – according to IDC.
Furthermore, they forecast that enterprise and service provider spending on hardware, software, and services for edge solutions will sustain the pace of growth through 2026 and spending will reach nearly US$317 billion.
Tech Data’s and Cloudera’s latest data-in-motion offering is thus yet another strategic move to meet customers’ desire to gain control of and leverage data as an asset for the business – rather than being bogged down by its complexities.
“We are focused on making it easier for businesses to get the most value out of their data by simplifying how they manage, access, and analyse their data,” said Remus Lim.
“As they move forward in their digital transformation, businesses will be generating and collecting even more data. However, storing and managing the data creates more complexity due to the increased volume and the use of various platforms.
“Thus, with the CoE, we will also have greater capability to drive Universal Data Distribution, which allows companies to take control of their data flows from origination through all points of consumption.
“In the long run, we will broaden the scope of the CoE to include more industry use cases and demo assets for the banking, insurance, manufacturing, and telco industries. This may include IoT applications such as smart factories.”
