CData appoints finance Chief & ex-Google Cloud lead

CData has appointed James Rochette as Chief Financial Officer and June Yang to its board of directors, adding a finance executive and a former Google Cloud product leader to its senior ranks.

The appointments come as CData expands around its Connect AI Gateway product, designed to give AI agents and users governed access to data across enterprise systems. Rochette will lead the company's global finance organisation, while Yang will help guide strategy as a board member.

Rochette joins after senior finance roles at private equity-backed technology businesses and listed companies. Most recently, he was Chief Financial Officer of Anaqua, an intellectual property management software company, through its sale from Astorg to Nordic Capital.

Before that, he spent five years as Chief Financial Officer of Orolia, where he was involved in the company's sale from Eurazeo to Safran. He has also served as Chief Financial Officer at two private equity-backed companies through full investment cycles spanning value creation, mergers and acquisitions, and exits.

He holds a master's degree in finance from ISG Institut Supérieur de Gestion. Originally from France, Rochette has lived in the United States for more than a decade and is based in Washington, D.C.

Yang joins the board with a background in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and data infrastructure. She previously served as Vice President of Products & Design, Cloud AI and Industry Solutions at Google Cloud, where she led AI product strategy.

Earlier in her career, she held leadership roles at VMware focused on cloud platforms and emerging technologies. Her appointment adds board-level experience in bringing AI products into large organisations, a priority for CData as companies seek to integrate AI tools with internal business systems.

Chief Executive Officer Amit Sharma said the hires are part of a broader effort to build the business as companies move from testing AI tools to using them in day-to-day operations.

"Enterprises are putting agents to work in the systems that run their business, and that work has to be governed. That's the company we're building," said Amit Sharma, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of CData. "James has spent his career scaling software companies through growth and change and knows what that takes. June spent years at Google Cloud getting enterprise AI into production and has seen exactly where it stalls. Both make us sharper."

The company's recent product launch has been central to that message. Connect AI Gateway is intended to act as a control point between AI systems and the software platforms businesses rely on, handling access to underlying data while applying governance and company context.

That positioning reflects a wider debate across the technology sector about how businesses can use generative AI tools without losing control of sensitive information or relying on disconnected data sources. Companies building software in this area have increasingly focused on the practical challenge of linking AI models with live operational data inside finance, customer service, supply chain and other enterprise functions.

Rochette said the company's latest product creates a fresh opening for growth.

"CData has built a strong foundation, and Connect AI Gateway opens a significant new opportunity," said James Rochette, Chief Financial Officer of CData. "I've spent my career helping software companies scale through growth and transformation, and I look forward to working with Amit and the team to build CData's next chapter."

Yang also pointed to data access and governance as the central issue for companies trying to move AI from experimentation into production use.

"The fundamental barrier to enterprise AI is no longer the models themselves - it's delivering governed, real-time enterprise data and context to those models the moment they need it," said June Yang, Board Member of CData. "CData bridges that gap, making enterprise data instantly usable without giving up the controls enterprises require. That's the difference between AI experimentation and AI you can run a business on, and it's why I'm excited to join the CData board."

CData says its technology connects data across hundreds of enterprise systems and serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide, including large technology groups and software providers.