The modular platform runs standalone or alongside existing data lakes, giving teams self-service provisioning and automated management through a single control plane spanning public cloud, sovereign infrastructure and private data centres – without moving the underlying data.
Cloudera has thrown its weight behind a hybrid-first vision for enterprise AI, unveiling Cloudera Anywhere Cloud at its EVOLVE26 event in Singapore – a platform built to run agentic AI directly against enterprise data wherever it sits.
The bet is that enterprises want cloud-native speed without the usual trade-offs – data residency risk, vendor lock-in, drawn-out migrations. Cloudera’s own research found 73-percent of IT leaders say infrastructure performance constraints have already held back their AI initiatives, a number which may explain why so many high-value projects stall before production.
The Anywhere Cloud capability is built to close that gap. The modular platform runs standalone or alongside existing data lakes, giving teams self-service provisioning and automated management through a single control plane spanning public cloud, sovereign infrastructure and private data centres – without moving the underlying data.
Three years of pieces coming together
Anywhere Cloud isn’t a name Cloudera just coined. The company has been assembling Anywhere Cloud for nearly two years, one acquisition at a time. It started at EVOLVE24 in New York in October 2024, where Cloudera partnered with Snowflake on an Iceberg-based open lakehouse and picked up Octopai for data lineage and cataloguing – following its earlier acquisition of Verta for private AI inference.
A year ago at EVOLVE25 in Singapore CEO Charles Sansbury laid out a vision of “true data estate orchestration” backed by roughly USD300 million in R&D and M&A spend. Chief technology officer, Sergio Gago, with chief product officer, Leo Brunnick, also unveiled Agent Studio for multi-agent workflows alongside Cloudera Data Services 2.0.
The Taikun acquisition was talked about a lot – it was Cloudera’s third in fourteen months – and it brought a unified Kubernetes control plane that the company has since framed as the “final piece” needed for true hybrid delivery.
Leo explained, “There’s a number of pieces that led up to having Taikun being the last missing piece. We had a really good this and a really good that… but the overall was trapped inside a 15-year old architecture.”
“By pulling those things into Taikun and doing a reassembling and reimagining, we’re able to do in 12 months what would arguably take a lot longer. And if it weren’t for the AI tools that had emerged along the way, it still couldn’t have been done in 12 months.”
By February 2026, Cloudera was already citing Taikun as accelerating “the vision and delivery of Cloudera Anywhere Cloud.”
What the company unveiled during EVOLVE26 in Singapore is that roadmap converted into a single, sef-service, generally available platform – the acquisitions, the lineage tooling and the agent framework packaged as one product rather than a set of announcements.
“Enterprise AI has outgrown the public cloud-only model,” said Leo. “Organisations shouldn’t have to choose between innovation and control. Cloudera Anywhere Cloud brings the speed and flexibility of the cloud directly to enterprise data.
“This allows enterprises to accelerate AI initiatives while maintaining complete ownership of their data and intellectual property, all while optimising the cost of their infrastructure, tokens and business models.”
Huge on hybrid
Cloudera chief revenue officer, Brian Rosso, admitted that although the company has been advocating hybrid for years, the market especially in North America (NA) wasn’t very receptive. In contrast, EMEA and APAC have had customers who moved to the cloud and are now repatriating some workloads or are setting up private/sovereign AI factories in their data centres.
“An AI marketplace capability has emerged with the launch of Anywhere Cloud. It will prefer partners who can deploy in a public cloud and a private environment.”
This shift makes hybrid a big opportunity for Cloudera.
In fact, an AI marketplace capability has emerged with the launch of Anywhere Cloud. Similar to cloud marketplaces by the likes of AWS and Google, it has a key differentiator – it will prefer partners who can deploy in a public cloud and a private environment.
Abhas Ricky, Chief Business Officer & GM of Applied AI, explained, “Because a majority of the customers who we serve are highly regulated industries, so one of the requirements they have is …(to) actually build applications wherever the data resides. And oftentimes a certain percentage of that happens to be in their private environments as well.”
Pushing beyond experimentation
Aligning with this is a new team of forward deployed engineers (FGEs) and applied AI scientists, to help enterprises build workflows and drive enterprise AI application development.
Abhas pointed out that this is a common trend among vendors now. “We are not alone on that front and it’s almost a customer expectation that vendors like ourselves will be able to help them get to production. And therefore we are building an Applied AI practice.”
The primary business goal of this practice is to help as many customers as possible get to build at least one if not more enterprise AI applications in a private environment.
Governance as the differentiator
Cloudera is positioning governance, sovereignty and private cloud support as the platform’s real edge. Every deployment is meant to automatically inherit enterprise policy, so a workload spun up through the marketplace, for example, carries the same compliance posture as one on-premises.
Sergio explained, “Your agentic data, your agentic platform and your AI need to be close to the data. You need to bring AI to the data, not the other way around. You need to use the same governance systems that you use for your BI dashboards and for your pipelines and machine learning algorithms, for the agents themselves.”
Early adopters are betting on that story.
Sergio Rodríguez de Guzmán, CTO and co-founder at IXEN.ai is reported as saying, “Working with complex data environments every day, we know that moving from AI experimentation to production requires both the freedom to innovate and confidence that data remains governed and under our control.”
“Cloudera Anywhere Cloud gives our teams a consistent foundation for data, analytics and AI across on-premises and cloud environments, and we’re excited about its potential to help us accelerate the development of agentic AI capabilities while maintaining the governance, flexibility and control required at enterprise scale.”