Cloud Stocks: Cloudera Focuses on Hybrid Cloud

According to an Allied Market research report, the global Hadoop-as-a-service market is estimated to grow at 39% CAGR to reach $74 billion by 2026 from $5.3 billion in 2018. Hadoop deployment helps provide scalability to enterprise technology solutions, thus helping reduce operating cost and use of commodity hardware for reliable distribution. Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR), a leading player in the market, reported strong results for the recent fourth quarter.

Cloudera’s Financials

Cloudera’s fourth quarter revenues grew 46% to $211.7 million, significantly ahead of the market’s forecast of $201.79 million. GAAP net loss was $0.22 per share compared with a net loss of $0.45 per share reported a year ago. On an adjusted basis, net income was $0.04 per share, which was better than the market’s forecast of an income of $0.03 per share.

During the quarter, subscription revenues grew 48% to $182 million and services revenues grew 38% to $29.8 million.

Among other metrics, it added 27 net new customers during the quarter who generate more than $100,000 of annualized recurring revenues (ARR). Adjusted ARR grew 11% over the year to $731.2 million.

Cloudera ended the year with revenues of $667.8 million compared with $406.3 million reported a year ago. Net loss per share was flat at $1.20 per share.

For the current quarter, Cloudera forecast revenues of $202-$207 million with an earnings forecast ranging from a loss of $0.01 per share to a net income of $0.01 per share. It expects to end the current year with revenues of $860-$880 million and a net income of $0.25-$0.29 per share. The market was looking for revenues of $204.3 million for the quarter with a net loss of $0.03 per share and revenues of $864.4 million for the year with a net loss of $0.01 per share.

Cloudera’s Hybrid Cloud Focus

Cloudera’s management is focusing on the development of its hybrid cloud platform to drive growth in the current year. It is working towards transforming from a mostly on-premise enterprise data management vendor to a true hybrid multi-cloud data platform provider. To deliver on this, it is taking four key steps.

First, product innovation in the organization will be for additional cloud native services offered for its Public Cloud, the introduction of its Private Cloud with added emphasis on the edge and real-time streaming opportunity with Cloudera data flow. The public cloud services will help it address the full lifecycle of data, allowing organizations to manage data from the point of origination, process it real time, report on it, and use machine learning capabilities to act on these data insights.

The second focus area is the delivery of a refined digital customer engagement model. Its engineering team is building automation and intuitive, easy-to-use functionality into the product to improve user experience. Besides UI, Cloudera will also work on improving its pricing, billing, support, and go-to-market solutions. It will adopt a digital customer engagement model to help customers learn about its offerings, explore its capabilities, and even begin production through a completely digital experience.

The third focus area is of an updated operating model that will be achieved by improving its sales execution, minimizing churn through changes to distribution, and protecting IP through licensing modifications.

Finally, Cloudera will focus on upgraded partnerships with the public cloud providers. According to Cloudera’s management, it currently has approximately 5 exabytes of customer under management and approximately 400,000 software installed servers in place. It plans to migrate a subset of these workloads to its public or hybrid cloud solutions. The migration will be a large revenue opportunity not only for itself, but also for the public cloud providers whose infrastructure will be necessary to enable hybrid cloud workload deployments. By strengthening its partnerships with all the public cloud providers, Cloudera will ensure that these providers can work seamlessly with each other to realize these benefits.

Cloudera’s PaaS Strategy

In 2017, Cloudera had launched Altus, a PaaS solution that allowed users to analyze and process data at scale in public cloud infrastructures. It provides a multi-cloud PaaS solution that automates massive-scale data engineering and data warehouse workloads in the public cloud and gives end users complete control over which cloud resources Altus clusters can use without giving access to data in their cloud account. Today, Cloudera has more than 3,000 software and system integration partners offering various solutions ranging from customer analytics, security and compliance, IoT products, and architecture modernization. While Cloudera does follow an active PaaS strategy, like many others, it does not divulge statistics around the focus. It would be interesting to see what these usage numbers are to determine how well is the capability doing.

The market was pleased with Cloudera’s results for the year. However, the recent economic turmoil has hurt the stock as well. Its stock is trading at $7.98 with a market capitalization of $2.36 billion. The stock had fallen to a 52-week low of $4.76 in June last year. The stock had climbed to a 52-week high of $12.22 earlier this year.

Photo Credit: techmsg/Flickr.com

This segment is a part in the series : Cloud Stocks