Back in the 1990s, Dilip Upmanyu sat in a room filled with servers as he pieced together a homegrown database of costs and SKUs. His employer at the time couldn’t tell which products paid the bills; by dawn, the young financial analyst could. That improvised profitability model, he tells us, still informs his investment mindset today.
Upmanyu never mistook rows of numbers for the whole story. Later joining IBM, he moved from product analytics to revenue accounting in a single year, then volunteered to face Wall Street. Preparing earnings decks, he practiced fielding questions until he could anticipate three out of four before the line opened. “Data matter only when you can explain the ‘why,’ ” Upmanyu tells us.
Read MoreA misstep—a brilliant job wrapped in toxic politics—taught him culture diligence. From then on he evaluated environments as rigorously as balance sheets. That instinct paid off when NetIQ sold to Attachmate: suddenly he was steering a global integration that tripled his team and required fresh capital. He treated the chaos as a practicum in fundraising and leadership, logging the final credit hours for his CFO ambition.
By the time Cloudera called in 2023, Upmanyu had stitched together every major finance discipline. Today he pushes growth by leading with the firm’s public‑cloud platform and embedding AI into forecasting.
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CFOTL: Let’s find out about Cloudera. Tell us about the company today—what does it do and what are its offerings?
Upmanyu: “Cloudera (today) handles the end‑to‑end data‑management needs of our customers. We do that on‑premise and in the public cloud, and we’re one of the few providers with a true hybrid platform… enabling clients to manage both environments through a single solution.”
Upmanyu: Cloudera is privately owned now, but it once traded publicly. Can you give us a short history of its capital structure?
Read MoreCFOTL: “Cloudera went public (around) 2016, then merged with (Hortonworks) in 2019. The company went private again in 2021, and I joined in late 2023.”
CFOTL; Since your arrival, what “chapter” are you opening for Cloudera and what growth challenges are you addressing?
Upmanyu: “When I started in 2023, our main objective was to increase the growth rate by leading with our public‑cloud product and by showcasing our enterprise AI and machine‑learning capabilities.”
CFOTL: Looking ahead, what are your top CFO priorities for the next 12 months?
Upmanyu: Most of my priorities are tactical. First, we have projects underway to enter markets where we don’t yet operate. Second, we’re expanding our data‑center footprint to support additional hardware and development environments. On the finance side, we’re rolling out (enhanced revenue analytics) to sharpen forecasting and pricing, while closely monitoring tariff developments and their potential impact.
Cloudera | www.cloudera.com | Santa Clara, CA