Kyndryl, Cloudera announce data transformation partnership

Kyndryl, the recent IBM services spinoff, continued its mission of signing partnerships with cloud and software providers, announcing a new deal this week with Cloudera. The partnership will focus on helping users accelerate data transformation projects across hybrid clouds.

As part of their agreement, the two companies will establish an innovation center to create a range of offerings specifically designed to ease the migration process as users move data to cloud environments. AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure environments are included in the plan.

Late last month, Kyndryl signed a deal with AWS that called for it to establish an AWS Cloud center of excellence that will work on products and services targeted at infrastructure and modernizing applications and workflows. The company has struck similar alliances with Google Cloud, VMware and SAP over the past few months, agreements the company sees as foundational for future growth.

"It is a heavier lift now than ever before for both enterprises to move to the cloud," said Gary Green, Cloudera's senior vice president of strategic partnerships. "This is because of the increased regulations, more complex technology considerations and the acceleration to the hybrid cloud world. We think we can provide end-to-end support for our mutual users."

This is the perfect example of the benefits [Kyndryl gains] by being independent. They can now flex their muscles to establish relationships they couldn't establish before.

The deal is yet another step taken by Kyndryl to better establish its own identity separate from IBM in the cloud-based technical services market.

"This is the perfect example of the benefits they [Kyndryl] gain by being independent," said Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects Inc. "They can now flex their muscles to establish relationships they couldn't establish before."

Kyndryl executives say their contribution makes it easier for users to take on-premises applications -- such as Cloudera's open source stack of 20 applications -- up to the cloud. The partnerships also give companies a more simplified and flexible path to running those applications across different cloud environments, according to Kyndryl.

"If a customer wants to take on-premises apps and data to various cloud providers like AWS, he has to use EMR [Elastic MapReduce] or go to Azure to use HDinsight," said Harish Grama, global practice leader for cloud at Kyndryl. "But Cloudera runs on all three [AWS, Azure, Google Cloud], so they don't have to care what they are currently running on."

The deal strengthens Kyndryl's hand with its existing users as they gradually move up the data stack, Grama said, giving his company new opportunities to expand its customer base.

"It gives us a chance to work with existing customers, but to add new [customers] that have Cloudera," Grama said. "All [on-premises] software packages are not completely cloud-managed, not even the cloud versions, because there are applications that run on top of them. They need someone to mix and manage all those apps into the stack."

Each company plans to focus on the delivery of offerings dealing with large-scale transformation projects by leveraging Kyndryl's data framework, toolkits and a team of specialists in data management and AI. Complimenting this collection are offerings from Cloudera's data analytics and AI portfolio.

The first order of business for each company is working together on the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) to streamline user processes involved with migrations and upgrades to cloud environments. Also a priority is improving managed services capabilities. Kyndryl will exploit modernization and platform management resources to produce data-center-class services that increase reliability, the company said.

As a way to refine its technical knowledge with Cloudera products, Kyndryl professionals will train to become certified in CDP technologies, the company added.

In a related announcement, Kyndryl signed a three-year deal to help Rimac Seguros, one of Peru's largest insurance companies, accelerate its cloud modernization efforts. Kyndryl selected Microsoft Azure, believing it to be the most appropriate platform to best meet the needs of the insurance company and support the applications used by its property and casualty businesses.

As editor at large for TechTarget's news group, Ed Scannell is responsible for writing and reporting breaking news, news analysis and features focused on technology issues and trends affecting corporate IT professionals.