UPDATED 19:42 EDT / JUNE 03 2020

BIG DATA

Cloudera’s stock plunges despite strong earnings

Big-data company Cloudera Inc. delivered strong financial results today that beat Wall Street’s expectations.

The company credited its new Cloudera Data Platform Public Cloud with boosting its value proposition among enterprise customers. It seems to be finding its feet after a dismal showing following its 2018 merger with former rival Hortonworks Inc.

Cloudera, which sells various data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning and analytics software to enterprises, reported a fiscal first-quarter profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 5 cents per share on revenue of $210.5 million, up 12% from a year ago. Wall Street had forecast zero profit on revenue of $204.6 million.

Cloudera Chief Executive Rob Bearden (pictured) said the company seems to be benefiting from remote work environments, which he said place more importance on data, data analysis and data security.

“In addition, CDP Public Cloud is accomplishing exactly what we had hoped in that it has enabled a hybrid multicloud architecture for our customers and enhanced our value proposition with customers who plan to take advantage of public cloud infrastructure for certain types of workloads,” Bearden said.

Cloudera also reported subscription revenue of $187.1 million, up 21% year-over-year, while its annualized recurring revenue came to $723.4 million, up 11% from a year ago. Those are strong numbers and investors tend to like those metrics because they indicate a more consistent revenue stream.

But whatever encouragement they offer was overshadowed by the company’s guidance for the second quarter, which came in below expectations. For the second quarter, Cloudera said it expects total revenue in the range of $206 million to $209 million, which is less than Wall Street’s $212.12 million forecast.

The company’s stock lost more than 11% of its value in after-hours trading.

Any software vendor that beats expectations during these challenging times needs to be congratulated, said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller. “Today it’s Cloudera’s turn, something that was not necessarily fair to expect only a few quarters ago. But the merger of Cloudera and Hortonworks seems to be delivering as demand for big data remains strong.”

“I think investors should focus on the ARR as it will be the future of IT, which is going to be consumption-based,” said analyst Patrick Moorhead. “The company saw record growth in large consumption customers. I think has surprised many with the output of hybrid solutions, but it needs more traction as a percent. I see this a matter of time.”

The Cloudera Data Platform, which was created following the merger with Hortonworks, was launched in September 2019. The company followed up with CDP Public Cloud in the fourth quarter of that year, initially making it available on Microsoft Azure. Since then, it has also integrated CDP Public Cloud with Google Cloud Platform.

Cloudera is also planning to release a private-cloud version of CDP later this month.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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