It’s smiles all round at big-data company Cloudera Inc., which saw its stock jump more than 10% today after posting financial results that easily beat Wall Street’s expectations.

The company, which sells various data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning and analytics software to enterprises, reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 4 cents per share on revenue of $211.7 million.

That was well ahead of Wall Street’s forecasts, with analysts having pegged Cloudera for a quarterly loss of 3 cents per share on revenue of $201.79 million. Cloudera also reported a loss of 13 cents per share on revenue of $794.2 million for the full fiscal year 2020.

Other metrics looked good too, showing that Cloudera is in a strong growth phase at the moment. The company reported annualized recurring revenue of $731.2 million at the end of the quarter, up 11% from a year ago. Meanwhile, the number of customers with an ARR of greater than $100,000 rose 27%, to 1,004.

New Cloudera Chief Executive Officer Rob Bearden (pictured), who assumed the role in January, said in a statement that the company’s performance showed it was executing well on its goals.

“I am especially pleased that we’re seeing strong interest in CDP, with many customers across our base building plans for CDP Public Cloud adoption,” Bearden said.

Bearden was referring to the company’s flagship Cloudera Data Platform offering, which was launched in September and incorporates much of the technology Cloudera acquired following its merger with former rival Hortonworks Inc. In the fourth quarter, Cloudera expanded availability of CDP to the Microsoft Azure marketplace, bringing it to even more customers. And in the coming quarter, Cloudera is planning to release a new version of CDP for private cloud users, Bearden said.

“I could not be more enthusiastic about the set-up for Cloudera as we enter the next phase of the market’s evolution, helping our customers realize true hybrid and multi-cloud data solutions,” Bearden said.

Analysts agreed that Cloudera has lots to be enthusiastic about after making such strong progress.

“The company seems newly energized under Bearden’s leadership,” said Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. “Its significantly improved financial performance is clearly pleasing to shareholders. It’s also worth noting that the stock’s performance also demonstrates that there’s no better time to reveal positive results than on a day when traders and markets are looking for good news.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE it was great to see Cloudera finally making inroads following its merger with Hortonworks.

“Big data is the platform on which all of next-generation applications depend on, forming a second layer of infinite computing, infinite questions and answers,” Mueller said. “Enterprises want to see strong third-party vendors that can compete with the largest cloud infrastructure players, and this is where Cloudera needs to play if it wants to survive.”

Cloudera was just as enthusiastic about its immediate prospects too, with executives saying they expect the company to report revenue in the range of $202 million to $207 million in the next quarter, just above the midpoint of Wall Street’s $205.2 million forecast.

Photo: SiliconANGLE