In this interview, Shubhangi Dua, Podcast Host, Producer and B2B Tech Journalist at EM360Tech, speaks to Mark Samson, Solutions Engineering Director, NEMEA at Cloudera, at Big Data LDN 2026 at Kensington Olympia, London.
Cloudera recently announced "Cloudera Anywhere Cloud," a data and AI platform designed for universal deployment. Big Data LDN was the first time the enterprise showcased it to an audience in person since its launch in August 2026.
The Cloudera Anywhere Cloud platform can be utilised across public clouds, on-premises environments, or sovereign data centres, supporting the entire data lifecycle.
What makes it different is that it’s hybrid by default. It can be used in any infrastructure, whether a public cloud, your own data centre or a partner data centre. “Previously, data architectures have been monolithic. That means you have to deploy to an entire platform,” Samson clarifies. “But now it’s Modular, meaning you can just deploy one data service and use only that one data service.” The upgrades to the software don’t affect the rest of the platform either.
It’s also sovereign by deployment. “Data sovereignty and digital sovereignty are on top of the agenda,” he adds. Cloudera’s new platform can help enterprises guard their perimeter and keep the data secure within the perimeter, so it's sovereign within the geography they should be in.
Samson also rallies for open platforms to maximise business value. He tells Dua that CTOs have tried to keep just a few tools for their employees to use in the business. “We need to open that up and make your data available for any tools available in the market.”
He adds that the way to open the data to tools in the market is through open platforms. That means platforms that are open to integration, such as open table formats like Apache Iceberg, where you can plug in any tool needed to optimise for that particular business advantage from your data.
Visit cloudera.com.
Cloudera was founded in 2008 by some of the brightest minds at Silicon Valley’s leading companies—including Google (Christophe Bisciglia), Yahoo! (Amr Awadallah), Oracle (Mike Olson), and Facebook (Jeff Hammerbacher). Doug Cutting, co-creator of Hadoop, joined the company in 2009 as Chief Architect and remains in that role.
Cloudera delivers an enterprise data cloud for any data, anywhere, from the Edge to AI. Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world's largest enterprises.
