Bouncing back from a disappointing outlook three months ago, big-data company Cloudera Inc. is riding high today on solid subscription revenue growth and the news that it’s raising its full-year earnings guidance.

Cloudera’s quarterly earnings came in above Wall Street’s expectations too. It reported a second-quarter loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 8 cents per share on revenue of $110.3 million. Analysts had forecast a 15-cent profit on revenue of $107.7 million.

Subscription revenue rose by 26 percent from a year ago, coming in at $93.1 million, representing 84 percent of its total revenue. Cloudera said it had $458.2 million in cash and equivalents at the end of the quarter.

Chief Executive Tom Reilly told investors the company had made “substantial progress” with its product and go-to-market transitions during the quarter. That included the launch of three new data warehouse products in the quarter, which Reilly said illustrates Cloudera’s ability to innovate.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said the second-quarter numbers indicated the company could attain profitability in a year or so.

“That would be a remarkable milestone given the lengthy journey toward creating an attractive product portfolio,” Mueller said. “On the product side, the new data warehouse releases are also a major milestone that demonstrate how Cloudera is moving the traditional data warehouse to Hadoop and the cloud. It’s good to see progress on the analytics and machine learning side too, as it makes Cloudera an interesting option as a platform for next-generation applications.”

Cloudera, which sells enterprise cloud and data services and counts Hortonworks Inc., MapR Technologies Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. as its main competitors, had been on a downward trend since April after lowering its full-year guidance for fiscal 2019.

Back then, Cloudera executives said it had failed to grab as many new customer bookings as it had hoped. That caused a massive selloff, with the company’s stock price falling by 40 percent in a single day. Cloudera didn’t do much better during its first-quarter earnings in June, when it disappointed on guidance once again, precipitating a further, albeit much smaller selloff.

But Cloudera had more encouraging news for investors today, raising its end-of-year guidance to reflect higher projected subscription revenue. The company said it’s now expecting revenue of between $440 million and $450 million, up from its previous forecast of $435 million to $445 million.

The market reacted warmly to the news, bidding up Cloudera’s share price by more than 14 percent in the after-hours trading session.

For the third quarter, Cloudera said it expects a net loss of 10 cents to 12 cents per share on revenue of $113 million to $114 million.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE