Big data pioneer Cloudera Inc. saw its stock lose more than 10% of its value in late trading today after offering revenue guidance for the next quarter and full year that came in far below analysts’ expectations.

It followed a strong fourth-quarter performance in which the company beat Wall Street’s targets by a good margin.

Cloudera, 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 on revenue of $226.6 million, up 7% from a year ago. Analysts had been looking for earnings of 11 cents per share on revenue of just $221.4 million.

The strong results capped off a relatively successful year for the company. For fiscal 2021, Cloudera reported total revenue of $869.3 million, up 9% from the previous year.

Meanwhile the company’s total annualized recurring revenue at the end of the year rose 10% from a year ago, to $778 million. ARR is something investors always look for because it represents a measurement of the company’s progress and also serves as a steadier prediction of future growth.

Cloudera Chief Executive Rob Bearden (pictured) said that the company’s main Cloudera Data Platform offering “demonstrated significant momentum” during the fourth quarter.

“Customers migrating to CDP increased from about 10% of our customer base at the time we reported Q3 to more than 15% of our customer base today,” Bearden added. “The adoption of CDP for hybrid data cloud and data lifecycle use cases is what will drive future growth and we’re very happy with this progress to date.”

Cloudera also managed to improve the quality of its revenue mix away from services and more into subscriptions, which can be very profitable, said analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc.

“Combined with pedestrian growth and cost cutting, laudably more in sales and marketing than R&D, the vendor was able reduce its net loss for the year by more than half,” the analyst added. “That’s a good direction, which management needs to maintain in 2021 if it’s going to deliver on the promises of the original Hortonworks and Cloudera merger.”

The strong results probably didn’t do much to prepare investors for some rather cautious guidance moving forward. Despite the encouraging growth over the last year, Cloudera executives said they expect earnings in the range of 7 to 9 cents per share on revenue of $216 million to $218 million. Wall Street had modeled earnings of 2 cents per share on substantially higher revenue of $227 million.

The full-year picture doesn’t get much better. For fiscal 2022, Cloudera said it expects a profit of between 35 and 39 cents per share on revenue of $907 million to $927 million, versus Wall Street’s forecast of 48 cents per share in profit on $945 million in revenue.

Photo: SiliconANGLE