Big-data specialist Cloudera Inc. delivered solid third-quarter financial results today, beating expectations on earnings and revenue and following up with strong guidance for the current quarter.

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 15 cents per share. Revenue came to $217.9 million, up 10% from the same period one year ago.

That was better than expected. Wall Street analysts were looking for earnings of just 9 cents per share on revenue of $209.2 million.

Cloudera Chief Executive Rob Bearden (pictured) said the company benefited from a 40% increase in paying customers for its CDP Private Cloud offering that was launched in the summer.

“With CDP Private Cloud now in-market, our hybrid multicloud offerings can be implemented by customers and our Enterprise Data Cloud vision is nearly complete,” Bearden said. “We believe that Cloudera has never been better-positioned to capture more of the rapidly growing data management and analytics market opportunity for hybrid multicloud solutions.”

Cloudera’s metrics were strong across the board. It reported subscription revenue of $197.3 million, up 18% year-over-year. Its annualized recurring revenue meanwhile came to $756 million, up 12%. ARR is something investors always look for because it represents a measurement of the company’s progress and also serves as a prediction of future growth.

It was an impressive quarter, according to Dave Vellante, chief analyst of SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon. “Cloudera is cleaning up the confusion around its products and its open-source strategy and is finding good traction with CDP and hard to solve data science problems,” he said.

Nice beat and raise from @cloudera – ARR up 12% beat expectations & guide above consensus for overall revenue & subscriptions. Operating profit guide was also more than 20% above consensus. Despite low expectations, looks like the ship is being righted.

— Dave Vellante (@dvellante) December 3, 2020

Cloudera said it had $567.5 million in cash and equivalents at the end of the quarter. Finally, it said its board has approved an additional $500 million in share repurchases.

During the quarter, Cloudera announced a major product update, adding more “experiences” to its Cloudera Data Platform that make it easier to prepare data for analysis and then share those results.

Constellation Research Inc.’s Holger Mueller said the strong quarter shows that Cloudera is at last delivering on its merger with Hortonworks Inc., its former rival in the big data space that was acquired in 2018. He said he was especially pleased to see the company’s strong subscription revenue growth.

On the other hand, Mueller said one possible sign of trouble might be Cloudera’s reduced professional services revenue. However, that might just be because the company has found synergies through its merger with Hortonworks, he said, noting that it has achieved a cost reduction of $81 million since then.

“In any case a strong quarter is a strong quarter,” Mueller said. “Now it’s up to the management to deliver in Q4 and maybe even turn a profit at last.”

Cloudera may well do that. For the next quarter, its forecasting earnings in the range of 10 to 12 cents per share on revenue of $219 million to $222 million. Wall Street had forecast fourth-quarter earnings of 10 cents per share on $215.7 million in revenue.

Cloudera’s stock rose more than 7% in after-hours trading.

Photo: SiliconANGLE