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Big-data company Cloudera Inc.’s stock took a battering today after it revealed Chief Executive Officer Tom Reilly (pictured) is retiring.

The company announced Reilly’s departure, effective July 31, at the same time that it posted its first-quarter financial results, missing expectations on revenue. Guidance for the next quarter also came up short.

Reilly, who has served as Cloudera’s CEO since 2013, will be replaced by Martin Cole, the firm’s chairman of the board, on an interim basis while the company begins its search for a permanent replacement, officials said.

The CEO transition comes during a worrying time for the big data industry’s main players. Cloudera was up until recently in much better shape, leading the way in commercializing the open-source Hadoop platform that’s used to store and process massive amounts of information.

But in recent months Cloudera and other big data firms have found themselves under pressure amid rising competition from public cloud infrastructure players such as Amazon Web Services Inc. That competition was likely one of the main reasons behind Cloudera’s merger with its former rival Hortonworks Inc., and also a factor in the possible demise of another big-data firm, MapR Technologies Inc., which announced it was shutting down its Santa Clara, California headquarters last month.

“This is a symptom of years of a market telling us that it didn’t want to spend a lot of money on open-source software that required armies of really smart and qualified people to extract value,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon. “It was also clear back in the early part of this decade that the cloud vendors were going to mop up on infrastructure for data analytics and it was going to hurt the original big three Hadoop distribution vendors.”

Both Cloudera and MapR have attempted to distance themselves from the Hadoop market in recent years as the once-expected riches failed to materialize. MapR tried to position itself as a universal platform for consolidating and harmonizing multiple data sources, while Cloudera emphasized product scope and machine learning applications. But the competition from cloud computing providers and trying to make money with a business based on open-source software has proven to be a tough challenge for both companies.

Cloudera’s first-quarter results did little to persuade investors that things might get better soon. The company reported a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 13 cents per share on revenue of $187.5 million. That was better than Wall Street’s forecast of a 23 cents per share loss, but fell short of its revenue projection of $188.4 million.

Even worse was Cloudera’s guidance for the second quarter and full year. The company said it’s now expecting a loss in the next quarter of between 8 to 11 cents per share on revenue of $180 million to $183 million. For the full year, Cloudera anticipates a loss of 28 to 32 cents on revenue of $745 million to $765 million.

Wall Street was hoping for much more than that. It had forecast a second-quarter loss of 10 cents per share on revenue of $202.9 million, and a full-year loss of 35 cents per share on revenue of $843.8 million.

The triple whammy of Reilly’s departure, missed expectations and light guidance was not well-received. Cloudera’s stock fell by a massive 31% in after-hours trading as many of its investors decided to cut their losses and run. Update: Shares fell almost 42% in Thursday trading.

Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said Reilly’s departure looks as if it was the result of a “coup d’etat” within the company’s leadership, and that it doesn’t bode well for its future prospects.

“Reilly was a top-flight CEO and well-regarded,” Enderle said. “Investors don’t really like coups and there doesn’t appear to be much confidence in Cole given the market’s reaction. This looks like a massive vote of no confidence in Cole, and if [those sentiments] carry over to Cloudera’s customer base, it could go into life support very quickly.”

Coup or not, Reilly carried on with his duties anyway, saying in a conference call there were several factors at play that were responsible for company’s dismal showing. First, he explained, customers are holding off on renewal agreements as they await the release of the Cloudera Data Platform this summer, which will be the first offering that combines Cloudera’s technology with that of Hortonworks’.

“Our enterprise customers are excited about extending their analytic workloads to the public cloud through Cloudera Data Platform, which will be available this summer,” Reilly said.

Reilly also spoke of the “uncertainty” that its merger with Hortonworks had on its new product roadmap, which was only published in March. During this time, the company saw “increased competition” from its public cloud rivals, Reilly said.

“From the time we announced the merger to where we got our road map, it was about a five-month period,” Reilly said in the call. “In that period, our sales force was a bit handicapped without getting clarity of what the roadmap would be, and without that clarity, we were at a competitive disadvantage, and we saw a number of opportunities get taken by the public cloud guys.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Cloudera was struggling because more enterprises are choosing to use the cloud offerings of public cloud companies rather than run their Hadoop projects on-premises.

“It looks like the combo of Cloudera and Hortonworks does not deliver the numbers expected, and so Reilly had to go,” Mueller said. “Cloudera needs to adjust to the new market dynamics and find attractive and growing offerings to maintain relevance going forward.”

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE