Big-data company Cloudera Inc. said today it’s planning to acquire Arcadia Data Inc. to add more analytics tools to its platform, shortly after posting second-quarter earnings that easily topped expectations.

Arcadia Data sells a business intelligence platform that uses visualizations to make data analysis easier to understand. The platform works directly on unstructured and semistructured data that’s stored in massive “data lakes,” which are centralized repositories of data stored in their original format.

The software combines the necessary facilities for reading and transforming data with an extensive set of visualizations delivered via a web browser. The approach effectively eliminates the need for extract tables and data transformation, enabling business users to get directly to information in their data lakes quickly and with minimal overhead.

Cloudera didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but said the plan is to integrate Arcadia Data’s technology with its platform to provide users with faster insights from cloud data stores and services such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Kafka. The two companies had already been working together, penning a deal in early 2017 to bring Arcadia’s tools to the Cloudera platform.

The acquisition will also help Cloudera to target new use cases in areas such as cybersecurity and the “internet of things,” the company said.

“It’s essential for business users to have access to the data they need, when they need it, and the addition of Arcadia Data’s technology and expertise will accelerate insights for our customers,” Cloudera Chief Customer Ifficer Anupam Singh said in a statement.

The acquisition is Cloudera’s first since it merged with its main big-data rival, Hortonworks Inc., last October.

Analyst Doug Henschen of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Aracdia Data started out by specializing in high-performance data-access and analytics against Hadoop and had more recently extended that promise to cloud object stores and streaming data by way of Kafka.

“All of these capabilities should largely complement, rather than overlap with, current Cloudera capabilities, so it’s a good pickup that I suspect came at an attractive price,” Henschen said. “Arcadia’s erstwhile competitors included AtScale and Kyvos, and all three companies have shifted their emphasis to high-scale data sources other than Hadoop and particularly cloud options.”

Cloudera announced the acquisition shortly after posting its second-quarter financial results, which easily surpassed estimates. The company reported a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 2 cents per share on revenue of $196.7 million. Wall Street had forecast a much wider loss of 10 cents on revenue of $183.27 million.

Cloudera’s stock rose more than 9% in after-hours trading.

“Most importantly, we delivered an initial release of our cloud-native data management and analytics offering, Cloudera Data Platform,” said Marty Cole, chairman of the board and interim chief executive officer at Cloudera. “We are focused on meeting our customers’ demands for hybrid and multicloud solutions that support use cases from the Edge to AI. That is the promise of CDP and the enterprise data cloud.”

These are certainly interesting times for Cloudera. The company recently found itself under the thumb of the renowned activist investor Carl Icahn, who revealed in July that he had acquired a 12.6% stake in the firm. Icahn has since increased that holding to 18.36%.

Icahn’s modus operandi is to buy a sizable stake in what he believes are undervalued companies and then make changes to their leadership and organization structure in order to unlock greater value. It’s unclear what Icahn’s plans are for Cloudera at this stage.

Image: Cloudera