05-08-2025
Cloudera acquires Taikun to boost data & AI across all clouds
Cloudera has acquired Taikun, a platform provider for managing Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, to strengthen its data and AI platform across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Cloudera's move allows the company to accelerate deployment of its platform, including Data Services and artificial intelligence workloads, across a range of settings from public clouds and on-premises data centres to sovereign and air-gapped environments, all managed through a unified control structure.
The need for more reliable and scalable data infrastructure has grown as enterprise IT environments become increasingly complex and distributed. The acquisition of Taikun provides Cloudera with native Kubernetes capabilities aimed at enabling simpler and more flexible operations, even within highly regulated or distributed contexts.
Cloud-like operation anywhere
Taikun's technology will give Cloudera an integrated compute layer, uniting deployment and operations throughout the information technology stack. This aims to deliver a cloud-like experience consistently across different environments. Customers will gain the flexibility to run data and AI workloads in data centres, clouds, or hybrid settings without compromising on performance or control.
Among the benefits highlighted are support for highly regulated environments such as GovCloud, Sovereign Cloud, and air-gapped data centres. Taikun's integration is expected to increase operational efficiency through zero-downtime upgrades and improved resource optimisation. Customers will also have the option to integrate a variety of tools and databases from Cloudera's ecosystem and third-party providers using a "bring your own engine" approach.
Cloudera described the acquisition as part of its approach to ensuring long-term flexibility for customers, enabling adaptation to future business mandates and maintaining alignment with changing requirements for data and AI workloads.
Executive perspectives "This acquisition marks a pivotal step in our mission to bring the cloud experience wherever enterprise data resides," said Charles Sansbury, CEO, Cloudera. "By integrating Taikun's container-native platform in our stack, we are removing operational barriers and enabling our customers to unlock faster insights, make smarter decisions, and drive real-time action in every corner of their business."
Following the deal, Taikun's engineering team will join Cloudera's broader engineering, product, and support organisation, with Taikun's base in the Czech Republic becoming a European development hub for Cloudera. "Our acquisition by Cloudera marks a pivotal moment for us," said Adam Skotnicky, former CEO of Taikun, "Our advanced cloud-native computing platform will enable customers from across the globe to deliver and deploy services and applications seamlessly, whether that's in the data centre or in multi-cloud environments. Only Cloudera is the right organisation for us to join during this critical moment for data and AI."
Industry analysts noted the challenges organisations face due to dispersed data and application management, and suggested that the merger could provide improvements for AI and analytics across diverse environments. "Organisations are suffering more than ever from fragmented data and application management across diverse infrastructures, increasing complexity, costs, and limiting data/AI initiatives," said Sanjeev Mohan, Principal, SanjMo. "The result: compromise on workload placement and data analysis. With Cloudera's acquisition of Taikun and integration in Cloudera's platform, organisations can now run AI and analytics anywhere their data lives - from cloud to edge - accelerating insights, empowering smarter choices, and driving real-time responses throughout their organisation."
Acquisition strategy
This is Cloudera's third acquisition in 14 months, following the purchase of Verta's operational AI platform in May 2024 and Octopai's data lineage and catalogue solution in November 2024. These acquisitions have been aimed at reinforcing Cloudera's platform and ensuring customers have flexibility in how and where they manage data and AI workloads.
Follow us on:
Share on:
