Big Data Company Cloudera's Earnings Beat Target, Spurring Stock Price Surge

Big data specialist Cloudera Inc. recently posted stellar third-quarter financial results, with both revenue and profit beating expectations and guidance for the current quarter also very strong.

The company, which sells data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning and analytics software to businesses, reported earnings of 15 cents per share, excluding certain costs such as 15 cents per share in stock incentives. Revenue came in at $217.9 million, up 10% from a year earlier.

This result was better than expected. Wall Street analysts had expected earnings of just 9 cents per share on revenue of $209.2 million.

Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden said the company's results benefited from the launch of its CDP private cloud product this summer, which saw a 40 percent increase in paying customers.

"Now, with CDP Private Cloud coming to market, our hybrid multicloud offerings can be implemented by customers, and our enterprise data cloud vision is nearing completion," said Bearden. Well-positioned to capture additional opportunities for hybrid multi-cloud solutions in the fast-growing data management and analytics market."

Cloudera's results for the quarter were strong across the board. The company reported subscription revenue of $197.3 million, up 18% year-over-year. Meanwhile, its annual recurring revenue hit $756 million, up 12%. Investors have always placed a high value on ARR because it is a measure of a company's progress and represents a forecast of future growth.

Dave Vellante, principal analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon, said it was an impressive quarter. "Cloudera is clearing up the confusion surrounding the company's product and open source strategy, and using CDP to build really good traction, the company is trying to solve problems in the data science space," he said.