Cloudera Inc. is overseeing a convergence between the data center and the cloud. The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools has created the need for more accessible and interconnected data architectures. Cloudera’s solution is a strong data foundation with a simple interface. Sergio Gago, chief technology officer of Cloudera. “Instead of the traditional ingest, prepare, curate, distribute data, just a single interface that makes it easy to get insights from the data because at the end of the day, that is what we’re trying to do, get value from insights.” Gago describes three eras of data, based on governance, convenience and now, convergence. In the era of governance, Cloudera and Hortonworks built data platforms that could manage company workflows and data catalogs. Cloud platforms ushered in the era of convenience, making it possible to run workloads with “one swipe.” The next step, according to Gago, is to merge the data and compute. “We’re bringing that cloud experience into the data center and vice versa,” he explained. “You can run your pipelines, you can store your data, you can manage your models, you can do everything with the same governance and controls that you had in the first era, but also with the simplicity you had in the second era. We call that the era of convergence.” This era is driven by generative AI, which has brought a unique set of challenges for data providers. The user experience is growing increasingly thin, as developers gain the ability to communicate with the system itself through AI interfaces. Cloudera has created an abstraction layer that enables developers to access their data anywhere. AI is, naturally, a part of this experience, functioning as a kind of “Jiminy Cricket” on the developer’s shoulder.