The Inside Scoop

Companies Big and Small: Full Stack Vs Best-Of-Breed Point Solutions

By Dennis Duckworth

Recently back from AWS re:Invent, my mind is still buzzing from the sheer scale of the event and all the valuable conversations, meetings, and demonstrations. The AWS ecosystem is absolutely incredible—over 2,000 companies had some kind of presence there, including Cloudera. Rows and rows of huge colorful, and often noisy booths competing for attention. With so much to see, where do you spend your time?

While I do learn a lot from visiting the mega booths, I find myself drawn to the tiny ones.  Those are the domain of start-ups or smaller companies that just haven’t advanced up their growth curve yet. What I find most interesting about those vendors is that they often represent best-of-breed offerings in very narrow slices of the market. It is tough being with such a small company at such a large show – you don’t offer something for everyone so if you get any visitors stopping long enough to have a conversation, those conversations will not result in a lead. Many customers these days are not looking for best-of-breed point solutions – they want full solutions. While you may get better performance or functionality out of a b-o-b component, the time and effort of integrating that component into your existing IT environment is often more than any company wants to invest. So if those small vendors don’t hit it big organically, they will partner with larger companies (like Cloudera) or they will get acquired or just run out of money and time.

Cloudera offers one of the most complete data, analytics, and AI platforms available. From the conversations I had at the Cloudera booth, I found that we had something of value to offer almost every company I spoke with. We don’t offer everything – for those critical pieces we don’t have, we partner (like with AWS and NVIDIA) or we find and acquire best-of-breed point solutions, as we did with Verta not long ago and Octopai more recently.