Cloudera Inc. today named longtime technology executive Charles Sansbury as its new chief executive.

Sansbury (pictured), who previously held leadership roles at several enterprise software companies, is succeeding outgoing Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden. The leadership change is not unexpected. In June, The Information reported that Bearden had informed Cloudera employees of his plans to step down.

“With over 25 million terabytes of data under management, Cloudera guides many Fortune 1000 enterprises who are focused on implementing open data lakehouses as a major step toward their expanded use of artificial intelligence,” Sansbury said in a statement. “I am confident the company will continue to execute on its product leadership position and growth initiatives.”

Cloudera launched in 2008 with a focus on commercializing Hadoop, an open-source data analytics platform. It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017. The company generated more than $220 million in annual revenue at the time of its stock market listing. 

Two years after going public, Cloudera merged with Hortonworks Inc., one of its top rivals in the Hadoop software market. Outgoing Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden joined the software maker shortly after the deal closed. Bearden was a member of Hortonworks’ founding team and led the company as chief executive prior to the merger.

In 2021, Cloudera was acquired by private equity firms KKR and CD&R through a transaction worth $5.3 billion.

Over the years, Cloudera gradually expanded its focus beyond the Hadoop ecosystem. Its current flagship offering is a data management and analytics toolkit called the Cloudera Data Platform. It enables companies to collect records from multiple systems, analyze those records and build machine learning models.

Sansbury is joining Cloudera as CEO after previously holding the same role at ASG Technologies Inc. between 2014 to 2021. ASG was a provider of data management software that counted thousands of organizations as customers. In 2021, it was acquired by Rocket Software Inc., a portfolio company of Bain Capital.

Before joining ASG, Sansbury was chief operating officer of another enterprise software maker called The Attachmate Group Inc. Attachmate was at one point the parent company of SUSE SA, a major Linux distributor that is now publicly traded.

Sansbury is set to start his first day as CEO Monday. Cloudera stated that the executive will focus on “business growth acceleration” and enhancing the company’s AI capabilities. Cloudera’s platform already includes several AI tools that are designed to ease tasks such as training machine learning models and deploying them in production. 

Photo: ASG Technologies