Cloudera CEO on the Middle East’s hybrid AI future: ‘Workload portability is the foundation’

Private AI and data sovereignty

The surge in AI adoption across the Gulf is also shaping this hybrid trajectory. Enterprises are under pressure to deploy AI rapidly, while keeping sensitive data in national borders.

“Many of our customers handle highly sensitive financial, government or healthcare data,” Sansbury says. “Factor in privacy and data-sovereignty regulations, and a significant portion of AI workloads will remain on-premise or in private cloud environments for the foreseeable future.”

This trend aligns with regional digital-transformation strategies, particularly in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which mandate stronger controls over data flows and AI governance.

To meet these needs, Cloudera has spent the past two years rebuilding its platform around full workload portability, enabling organisations to run the same data and AI workloads across any compute environment. Containerisation and the acquisition of Tycoon, a Kubernetes platform, underpin Cloudera’s new Anywhere Cloud, providing consistent deployment, governance and operational control.

“Customers wanted the cloud experience but with on-premise economics and control,” Sansbury says. “Containerisation gives them both ease of deployment and upgrades, plus the freedom to run workloads where they make the most sense.”

“Customers wanted the cloud experience but with on-premise economics and control”

Charles Sansbury, Cloudera

In the Gulf, hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud continue to expand, but Sansbury maintains that large enterprises require capabilities beyond what cloud-native tools can offer.

“We’re not trying to compete for every workload,” he says. “For the largest companies, we are the data platform of choice, because they need scalability, security and industrial-grade hardening that hyperscalers’ native tools don’t provide.” He also points to the confusion created by marketing language across providers. “Everyone uses the same 100 words to describe different things. Events like this allow us to show what our platform actually does.”

Cloudera has just surpassed $1.1bn in annual revenue, and Sansbury expects “dramatic” growth as hybrid AI deployments accelerate, with the Middle East emerging as one of the most active regions.

Across the energy, finance, government and industrial sectors, Middle East organisations are demanding hybrid, secure, sovereign and AI-ready platforms. By focusing on workload portability rather than competing solely for cloud dominance, Cloudera aims to become a foundational layer of the region’s digital economy.

“The Gulf is building some of the most advanced digital infrastructures in the world,” Sansbury concludes. “Hybrid architectures are at the centre of that future, and workload portability is what makes it possible.”