Cloudera has used acquisitions to fill technology gaps and accelerate development work that it might otherwise have undertaken internally, CEO Charles Sansbury said. Since taking the helm in August 2023, he has overseen three such acquisitions, each adding technology or expertise to the company’s portfolio.
At a media roundtable in Singapore, Sansbury explained the strategy and direction behind Cloudera’s M&A, as well as how the company plans to address recurring enterprise data and AI challenges.
Chess moves
When Sansbury joined Cloudera, OpenAI had just launched ChatGPT, and it was clear to him that companies were increasingly considering how to develop and deploy AI-based applications.
One year later, in June 2024, Cloudera announced its acquisition of Verta, an operational AI start-up whose platform managed large language models across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The acquisition added AI expertise and technology intended to help Cloudera meet growing demand among its global users.
By November that year, the company had acquired Octopai, an automated data lineage and metadata management platform designed to give enterprises greater visibility, governance, and traceability across multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
“We started hearing about the importance of data governance, data lineage, and data quality. We had some capabilities of our own, but we started looking for a data governance and data lineage tool,” Sansbury said.
As Cloudera sought to make its platform easier to configure and deploy, containerisation was the obvious answer. Rather than use technology from one of the large vendors in the market, the company concluded that it needed to own the technology, not to compete with companies such as Red Hat, but to use it as an embedded internal component.
“We looked at four different companies around the world and bought Taikun, but that was not just about adding a feature or function. It fundamentally changed how we think about the way the product is built and deployed,” the CEO explained.
Cloudera announced its acquisition of Taikun, a cloud-native infrastructure platform for managing Kubernetes across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, in August 2025.
“The technology we acquired from Taikun was highly extensible, and it met an emerging market need for a single control plane, so it effectively became another branch of our product direction,” Sansbury said.
Across the three acquisitions, the CEO said generative AI remained central to Cloudera’s product strategy.
“I don’t know whether there is a containerisation framework that wouldn’t have supported the generative AI strategy. All the acquisitions we’ve made are technology building blocks that we’ve repurposed to serve the strategy, which is to build out this platform for analytics and AI,” he said.
Anywhere Cloud
In August this year, Cloudera announced Anywhere Cloud, a platform for building, deploying, and scaling data and AI applications across multi-cloud and on-premises environments. Sansbury said Taikun’s technology was pivotal to its development.
“Taikun had developed an orchestration layer on top of its Kubernetes technology that could be repurposed into the single operational control framework that we’ve announced as Anywhere Cloud,” he said.
In developing Anywhere Cloud, Sansbury said many enterprises had not completed the data hygiene work they should have. As proprietary data became a key input into the results companies could obtain from AI, the initial response was to move all that data to one place.
Customers then found that some data could not be moved, some data was not something they wanted to move, and the data they did move was expensive, he said.
“One of the founding principles of Anywhere Cloud is to let organisations leave data where it resides and carry out data engineering through an abstraction or control layer. In our view, that helps CIOs address a messy data estate by using data where it exists and bringing compute to the various places where the data resides,” he said.
Using external table technology such as Apache Iceberg, Cloudera can then create virtual, federated data sets from data that remains where it originated, without requiring a large data re-engineering exercise before work can begin, the CEO added.
Sansbury said Cloudera built Anywhere Cloud in response to demand for a common control plane across multiple computing environments.
Future prospects
Looking ahead, Sansbury cited physical AI as one area Cloudera is examining alongside efforts to improve current generative AI use cases.
“Within corporations, the main use cases have been code completion, chatbot development, and next-generation customer service. We’ve gained a great deal of productivity internally from these applications. I still think most companies are focused on such quick wins because these applications can produce results quickly,” he said.
On future acquisitions, Sansbury said Cloudera already had enough development work in progress for the short term.
“Right now, we have enough on the shop floor to build for the next 12 months, but there will always be areas where we might look to acquire rather than build our own technology,” he noted. “It would be a small company with a product that has demonstrated market fit but hasn’t achieved sales escape velocity, because then you obtain the product without having to pay for a revenue stream. There may be certain product areas where we look for companies like that.”
