As enterprise-level artificial intelligence (AI) officially enters the "production phase," strategic collaboration across the entire partner ecosystem has become more important than ever. Cloudera's Chief Strategy Officer, Awassa Ricky, emphasizes that deep collaboration among technology partners—the so-called "co-design"—is key for enterprises to move beyond simple proof-of-concept or pilot projects and integrate AI into their actual workflows.
Speaking at the 'AI Factory: The Data Center of the Future' event, co-hosted by the New York Stock Exchange and SiliconANGLE, he stated, "AI is essentially a team sport," noting the need to restructure the entire workflow encompassing data, models, and infrastructure. He added that this requires moving beyond simple automation or digitization to "redesigned processes" that align with actual business objectives.
Cloudera is currently working with NVIDIA to build an enterprise AI ecosystem, helping enterprise customers achieve optimal cost-effectiveness by adding features such as model catalogs and high availability to its inference microservices architecture. In particular, the pre-validated architecture developed in collaboration with Dell helps shorten the AI deployment cycle from months to weeks.
The adoption of enterprise-level AI is accelerating, but in this process, "inference economics" is becoming a new challenge. The era has arrived where it's no longer just about training models, but about quantifying specific metrics, such as the cost of each actual query, GPU usage time for each task, and the profit reduction resulting from continued use of public APIs. Ricky explained, "The ongoing profitability assessments are more rigorous than ever before."
Amid this transformation, even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that "in the future, enterprises will be able to redefine their businesses based on AI-enabled intelligence," making strategic AI responses from enterprises even more urgent. In fact, predictions are widely circulating that 2025 will be the year when "agent-based workflows" move beyond the pilot phase and transition to full-fledged services.
Experts unanimously agree that the success or failure of AI ultimately depends more on the ability to integrate and operate its ecosystem and proactive strategies in a viable manner than on the technology itself. The collaboration between Cloudera and NVIDIA is gaining attention as a prime example of how to achieve this synergy.
