Big-data company Cloudera Inc. posted fiscal second-quarter results today that beat Wall Street’s expectations, but the strong performance wasn’t enough to prevent its stock falling slightly in after-hours trading.

The company, which sells data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning and analytics software to enterprises, reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 10 cents per share on revenue of $214.3 million, up 9% from a year ago. Wall Street had forecast a profit of 7 cents per share on revenue of $208.14 million.

Cloudera said that demand for its Cloudera Data Platform had helped to offset weaker information technology spending because of the coronavirus pandemic during the quarter.

The company reported annualized recurring revenue of $739 million in the quarter, up 12% from a year ago. ARR is an important metric for investors because it represents a measurement of the company’s progress and serves as a prediction of future growth.

Cloudera said it now has 1,007 customers with $100,000 of ARR and 172 customers with ARR of more than $1 million.

In a conference call with analysts, Cloudera Chief Executive Rob Bearden (pictured) said the company had doubled its number of Cloudera Data Platform Public Cloud customers in the quarter,and saw similarly strong bookings.

“Although recognized revenue is currently modest, we are encouraged by market reception to CDP Public Cloud,” he said. “These offerings are differentiated as discrete services and will scale over time. CDP Public Cloud’s immediate strategic value lies primarily in its enablement of hybrid data architectures, playing an essential role in creating an Enterprise Data Cloud for our customers.”

Bearden said the company also got a boost from the launch of its Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud offering, which gives it better access to the hybrid and multicloud markets. On the call, he told analysts that CDP Private Cloud helps to strengthen the company’s relationships with public cloud infrastructure giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp.

“Since we expect the development of enterprise data clouds among our customer base to drive increased public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service consumption, CDP Private Cloud fuels our public cloud partnerships with AWS, Azure and Google,” Bearden said. “We estimate that the cloud providers will generate 4 to 5 dollars in compute and storage revenue for every dollar of software revenue earned by Cloudera. This potential IaaS revenue is the focus of our hyperscale cloud partners and drives our interactions with them.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said the CDP Private Cloud offering was an encouraging development because it helps Cloudera tap into the next-generation compute platform trend that’s bringing cloud stacks to on-premises environments.

“On the financial side, it’s good to see Cloudera really narrowing the financial challenges and it will likely be able to turn a profit next quarter,” Mueller said.

Pund-IT Inc. analyst Charles King told SiliconANGLE that Cloudera was benefiting from customers that are actively pivoting to the cloud and need expert advice and assistance.

“Bearden’s comments about the company being more of a partner to major players like AWS, Microsoft and Azure and Google Cloud was a sensible leveling of expectations since there’s little chance that a cloud software player like Cloudera will ever be as economically dynamic as cloud service providers,” King said. “That said, the company continuing to beat analysts’ expectations is a good sign of solid management and execution, and could position Cloudera to continue performing solidly in post-COVID-19 markets.”

For the third quarter, Cloudera said it’s expecting an adjusted profit of 8 to 10 cents per share on revenue of $207 million to $210 million. That compares well with Wall Street’s forecast of earnings of 7 cents per share on revenue of $205.5 million.

For the full year, Cloudera is projecting revenue of $839 million to $853 million. Wall Street had earlier forecast full year revenue of $838.7 million. Cloudera said its full-year outlook assumes the “recessionary impact” of the COVID-19 will continue through the fourth quarter.

“We are not immune to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19, but we believe our business is more resilient than most enterprise software companies’,” Bearden said. “This is true because our offerings support digital transformation initiatives and mission-critical use cases.”

Cloudera’s stock fell more than 2% in after-hours trading.

Photo: SiliconANGLE