Shares of big-data pioneer Cloudera Inc. plummeted as much as 18 percent in after-hours trading Thursday following its first earnings report since going public in April.

The company, which offers machine learning and data analytics products based around the open-source Apache Hadoop platform for managing huge amounts of data across computer systems, actually reported results better than analysts had expected.

But on measures investors watch for signs of future growth, such as deferred revenue and billings, Cloudera came up short, prompting some investors to bail out. Update: Investors didn’t feel much better on Friday, when shares fell nearly down nearly 16 percent, albeit on a day when the tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell more than 2 percent.

The company reported a net operating loss of $222.3 million for its first fiscal quarter, thanks to an unexpectedly high $191.5 million charge for stock compensation costs associated with the initial public offering. Adjusted for those and other onetime costs, Cloudera posted a loss of 27 cents a share on revenue of $79.6 million, up 41 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting a loss of 35 cents per share on revenue of $75.8 million.

Cloudera also issued better-than-expected guidance for its full fiscal year. It said it expects revenues for fiscal 2018 of between $345 million and $350 million, which exceeds the $338 million forecast from Thomson Reuters.

All those positives went for naught, however. Cloudera also posted deferred revenue and billings that fell short of Wall Street’s projections. Investors like to see solid outperformance on those metrics, which are an indicator of growth several quarters down the road.

Nonetheless, Cloudera Chief Executive Officer Tom Reilly (pictured) put a positive spin on the results, playing up some of the company’s recent innovations.

“We had a strong first quarter as a public company, making progress against many of our key objectives,” he said. “In Q1, we continued our innovation leadership in machine learning with the introduction of Cloudera Data Science Workbench; in IoT with the general availability of Apache Kudu; and in cloud analytics with our first platform as a service offering, Cloudera Altus.”

Cloudera’s stock had risen by 53 percent since the IPO, to $22.99, before falling back to $19.60 in after-hours trading.

The stock reaction is a sign that investors are starting to understand what matters beyond revenue growth for cloud-oriented companies that make most of their money charging subscriptions rather than selling licenses like traditional software companies. But it has been tough on a number of enterprise software companies that have gone public in the past year or so. “It shows how tough the markets are on tech companies in general – and newly IPO’d ones specifically,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc.

Mueller said the underlying big-data market is healthy, but it’s only getting more competitive as new startups flock in and open-source software projects keep multiplying. “The question for Cloudera is, how much market share of that growing market it can capture,” he said.

Others have expressed doubt about how soon Cloudera can cut its losses. George Gilbert, big-data analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, also said public cloud providers such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. may provide big-data services with much less complexity.

Image: Robert Hof