Cloudera CEO: Anywhere Cloud is our biggest product launch since going private

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Charles Sansbury, Cloudera CEO.

It’s been almost five years since Cloudera went private following its acquisition by private equity firms. Since then, the data and AI platform vendor has continued to innovate its Cloudera Data Platform to provide its customers with the ease of managing data both on-premises and the cloud.

The vendor has made a few acquisitions over that past five years as well with the Taikun acquisition being the most recent one in August 2025. The Taikun acquisition proved to be the most important acquisition strategically for the vendor as it looked to finally provide customers with a hybrid platform that can help them with their data management.

Cloudera Anywhere Cloud, which was unveiled during the vendor’s Evolve26 Summit in Singapore is a product that builds on the Taikun acquisition, following a billion dollar in spending on R&D over the last three years.

For Charles Sansbury, Cloudera CEO, Anywhere Cloud is probably the biggest product release by the vendor since the company went private. Speaking to CRN Asia during the summit in Singapore, Sansbury explained that since the acquisition of Taikun last year, the R&D team worked on a control panel following feedback it received from customers and were able to containerize the product and make it available sooner as Anywhere Cloud.

“So, the original timeline was to get the product out probably early next year. And we ended up increasing the R&D spend and accelerating development timelines, with the goal of being able to announce it in this process. So, it was a pretty big milestone for our development guys. I am proud of the work that the team has done to get to this point because we've gotten here a lot faster than we would have guessed when we acquired Taikun,” Sansbury said.

Sansbury said that the focus now is about creating market awareness and market understanding as customers have been thinking about solving the problem they face in the network cloud. However, there hasn't been a product to date that can do that.

“And so, we have a lot of really positive initial meetings around this technology. My guess is we're going to come out of this event with another set of requirements for the product, and we'll have another set of development milestones we have to hit in the next six to 12 months.”

At the summit, ExxonMobil, which was a Cloudera customer design partner for Anywhere Cloud, shared that the first installation took roughly six hours of manual setup work. However, the same process only took about 65 minutes after the first installation, saving a lot of time for the oil and gas company that relies heavily on data for its operations. Other customer design partners include DMIRAL Technologies, IQVIA, IXEN.ai and Mastercard.

“We think it dramatically changes the opportunity for us to work with customers, because it solves a big problem that customers have been talking about for a long time, but they haven't had a good solution. So our early feedback from meetings has been kind of wow, and can it really do this? Because I think they're surprised by the amount of functionality that's in the version of the product. But the reality is we started with a lot of the foundation work that Cloudera has done for 10 years and the Taikun acquisition, which was a fully functioning platform when we bought it. And then we've spent a year and a lot of people evolving the product set. So, it's a big release and it's an important product.”

Anywhere Cloud shaping Cloudera’s roadmap

While Anywhere Cloud is seen as the most important release by the vendor currently, Sansbury also explained that Cloudera is already focused on the next releases of the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), which may include a CDP 8 line in the future.

For now, Anywhere Cloud is a data platform that will run parallel to CDP and contemplate all the necessary requirements customers want from a hybrid data platform. Specifically, Anywhere Cloud can be deployed anywhere and has an extended governance across the entire data state, which Sansbury feels is a unique value proposition from a customer perspective.

“We believe we've built the optimal structure for companies managing data across hybrid environments. Anywhere Cloud is critical to what we're trying to do, which is to provide customers with a modern data platform that contemplates the hybrid architecture with the control they want. We call it Anymore Cloud because it's a cloud user experience extended to any platform. It is not necessarily cloud based. It can run on any underlying compute platform. It's critical to what we're doing,” he said.

Looking at how AI is having a presence in both the cloud and on-premises, Sansbury believes that customers are still trying to figure out which workloads should actually run on the cloud or on-premises or even on run hybrid. This competitive dynamic is what he believes Cloudera is making customers realize that don’t have to choose between the cloud-like interface and cloud-like user experience with Anywhere Cloud which gives them the ability to have a control plane that allows them to click and drag and drop to make changes to compute.

“You don't have to sacrifice moving all of your data to some other place. You can manage your data where it sits, but still have that cloud-like functionality. That, to us, is unique. But it's still the case that the hyperscalers are going to still tell you you're moving to the cloud. And so I don't think it changes the dynamic. I think it gives us a little bit more defensible position because I think the value prop is so unique. And I think it's the way that our big customers are thinking. And so we're going to kind of answer the question of what our modern data platform is,” he said.

Addressing data sovereignty and cloud costs

With data sovereignty becoming increasingly important in all regions globally, Sansbury explained that the whole idea of this is the capability to have control over the data set and not having to move it to the cloud.

“You basically manage it where it lies and still use it to kind of inform and train and deliver better results for your models. That's a big driver for us. What has changed, though, is even a year ago, people weren't thinking about where they ultimately deployed the workload as they were conceiving of the project,” Sansbury said.

Cloudera is seeing a massive uptick in interest around sovereign AI in the Asia-Pacific region, in the Middle East, and in Europe.

“Within each of these geographies, we're seeing the emergence of one or two or a set of startup initiatives to provide sovereign cloud. We actually have a dedicated effort working with some of those providers because it turns out that Anywhere Cloud is designed to be that control layer. And we actually have a couple of partners here who are in the process of building sovereign cloud specific to a geography within the Asia-Pacific region,” he said.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the cloud, Sansbury said that a lot of organizations did not think about the cost of the cloud initially.

“It is the case now that people are thinking about cost because they've been surprised negatively when they put workloads in place that are now costing them significantly more than they would have guessed. So, the other thing that Anywhere Cloud does is it allows you to have some workload portability. What that means is you can start to match workloads to the right computing platform,” he said.

“What we've seen evolve is, whether it's for security or cost reasons, some companies want to put some workloads on different platforms for a reason. So, for example, something is a relatively static workload that runs all the time with relatively predictable compute requirements like Fraud detection and prevention at a bank. That should run on hardware that the bank owns, on cloud-based hardware. It can cost four or five times as much,” he explained.

For Sansbury, the point is customers are learning more about the dynamics of each workload and Cloudera is now giving them the flexibility to be able to match that workload to the right computing platform, as opposed to saying everything has to go to a cloud-based repository and run everything on the cloud.

“That's not reality. That's not how the world is going to work. Not all data is going to move. And from a cost perspective, I think that many customers have learned that while the cloud is critical for a lot of initiatives, it is a luxury item, not a commodity item,” he said.

Acquisitions and customer growth

When asked if Cloudera will be looking to more acquisitions in the near future, Sansbury explained that that acquisitions that company had made was done to accelerate its R&D plans. While he acknowledges that there might a couple of areas that they are looking to fill, there is nothing on the scale of strategic importance as Taikun acquisition at this point of time as the vendor’s internal roadmaps are very full for the next 12 months.

On the number of new customers Cloudera hopes to have on the new platform within the year, Sansbury said that the focus now is to see the opportunity within the vendor’s existing install base.

“So, we're going to get the message out to our top couple hundred customers through these Evolve events. But we also have an effort focused on new customer acquisition, which we really hadn't focused on significantly previously. But this product is actually, because of the product market fit that we have observed. There's a big new customer opportunity as well,” he said.

“And whether it's 80% install base and 20% new customers or something different, a hundred would be a good number. But of a hundred, I think a lot of that's going to be from our install base,” he added.

Sansbury said the counsel the company gives to customers is to always think about the end deployment at the outset of their journey and think about the end state architecture, where companies are not going to move everything to one common platform.

“Of that's the case, then you need to actually kind of put upon the business the onus of figuring out which workloads are going to run where and build to that end. Because we had a bunch of people doing experiments and tests on cloud-based infrastructure, and then they would come to the deployment decision, and by default, it would be cloud-based. And people made a lot of mistakes and had a lot of cost overruns because of that,” Sansbury said.

“We've learned enough that you can begin with an end point in mind, and you can also be prescriptive enough to think about which workloads work on which platforms. Again, I said cloud is an incredibly important piece of technology, but it turns out it's not sufficient for large organizations' needs. And so, you need to think at the beginning of the process as to which workloads are going to end up on which platforms,” he concluded.