CData appoints Ken Yagen as Chief Product Officer

CData has announced the appointment of Ken Yagen as Chief Product Officer (CPO). He takes on the role from Manish Patel, who is now GM Data Integration after serving as the Chief Product Officer for nearly 4 years.

Patel will spearhead the strategic direction and operational excellence of CData’s data integration portfolio, enhancing product management and go-to-market strategies. He will also be responsible for P&L for the data integration portfolio, including revenue targets, growth metrics, and profitability goals. This is a logical career step. Does it put him in line for the CEO role, either at CData or elsewhere?

Yagen takes over the responsibility for leading product strategy and engineering. He joins as CData looks to scale its connectivity platform for enterprises deploying agentic AI internally and for software providers building AI into their products. CData is seeing rapid growth in the AI connectivity sector. CData’s McP servers are already proving popular with customers.

Amit Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of CData, commented, “Ken brings exactly the experience and vision we need at this stage of our growth. His track record building enterprise platforms at scale, combined with his deep expertise in distributed systems and AI infrastructure, makes him an ideal fit to lead our product organisation as we help customers navigate the AI era.”

AI-Native Connectivity is needed now!

Yagen joins CData, as integration platforms such as CData need to come to terms with the emerging category redefining integrations. Integrations need to be AI-Native, connecting autonomous agents between business systems. It goes beyond traditional fixed-API connectivity, integrating data and specific processes.

Systems require embedded system-level semantic intelligence that teaches AI the structure, relationships, and business logic native to each platform. With governance that translates across the connections.

Ken Yagen, Chief Product Officer at CData, commented, “AI will fail to achieve meaningful outcomes if agents don’t understand the systems they’re acting in.

“The enterprises that will dominate the AI era are the ones whose agents have real system fluency—not just access. CData is eliminating a core blocker in enterprise AI by giving agents both the connectivity and the deep, system-level context to operate safely, predictably, and at scale across Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP, and 350+ business systems.

“We’re building the context and control fabric that turns AI into a trusted digital operator inside the enterprise.”

Yagen intends to accelerate its dual go-to-market strategy. thus, enabling both direct enterprise adoption and embedded use by independent software vendors (ISVs). He will need to steer CData’s direction to attract both sets of clients, encouraging them to adopt the CData MCP Server platform to deliver enterprise-ready AI integration capabilities without having to build and maintain it all themselves.

Yagen added, “We’re building a comprehensive, secure MCP platform, and we’re early in this market. The opportunity is to make CData a go-to connectivity layer—one that enterprises can rely on internally and that product builders embed by default. This isn’t just about better integrations. It’s about making every AI system enterprise-ready from day one.”

Who is Ken Yagen

Yagen joins from Warburg Pincus, where he was SVP, Value Creation, for the last 5.5 years. He led AI and LLM initiatives across the firm’s portfolio companies, helping enterprises integrate emerging AI technologies into their business strategies.

CData is not his first Chief Product Officer role; he was also CPO at Symphony.com, which he later combined with the Chief Security Officer role. He also held product leadership roles at Box, MuleSoft, and Compasoft. At Mulesoft, he shaped product strategy for APIs and integration platforms that became foundational to modern enterprise architecture. His experience at Box and Symphony prepared him for the collaboration and enterprise SaaS sectors.

Yagen graduated from the University of Virginia with a BSC in Systems Engineering.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

Yagen has the experience to lead the CData product into the next generation of integration software. It will be interesting to see how he shapes the product in the next few months and what changes he makes.

It will also be interesting to see how Patel leads the data integration division. While Agentic AI is the next generation, the current data integration will also have a long tail of success. Having led the product team for so long, Patel has a strong understanding of the platform, which remains relevant for many organisations. It will be interesting to see how he shapes the organisation. After 15 years at CData, is Sharma looking for an exit? Or is this partly succession planning? Only time will tell.

The post CData appoints Ken Yagen as Chief Product Officer appeared first on Enterprise Times.