It’s nearing the end of the summer in North America, and one report has been a staple on my reading list for more than a decade: the Flexera State of the Cloud Report. The annual survey of hundreds of global IT decision makers assesses cloud strategies, migration trends, and important considerations for companies moving to the cloud or managing cloud environments.

The CRN Tech Innovator Awards spotlight innovative products and services across 36 categories, with winners chosen by CRN staff from over 320 product applications. This year, we’re excited to share that Cloudera’s Open Data Lakehouse 7.1.9 release was named a finalist under the category of Business Intelligence and Data Analytics.

By now, every organization, regardless of industry, has at least explored the use of AI, if not already embraced it. In today’s market, the AI imperative is firmly here, and failing to act quickly could mean getting left behind. But even as adoption soars, struggles remain, and scalability continues to be a major issue. Organizations are quick to adopt AI, but getting it established across the organization brings a unique set of challenges that come into play.

Data practitioners are consistently asked to deliver more with less, and although most executives recognize the value of innovating with data, the reality is that most data teams spend the majority of their time responding to support tickets for data access, performance and troubleshooting, and other mundane activities. At the heart of this backlog of requests is this: data is hard to work with, and it’s made even harder when users need to work to get or find what they need.

Over the past several years, data leaders asked many questions about where they should keep their data and what architecture they should implement to serve an incredible breadth of analytic use cases. Vendors with proprietary formats and query engines made their pitches, and over the years the market listened, and data leaders made their decisions.

Enterprise IT leaders across industries are tasked with preparing their organizations for the technologies of the future – which is no simple task. With the use of AI exploding, Cloudera, in partnership with Researchscape, surveyed 600 IT leaders who work at companies with over 1,000 employees in the U.S., EMEA and APAC regions.