Follow Datanami:
April 28, 2017

Cloudera IPO Lauded by Big Data Community

Cloudera officially went public today with an IPO that raised $225 million for the Hadoop distributor. While the now-public company’s valuation may be about half what it was a few years ago, Cloudera and its partners in the big data community look at the IPO as a positive move for the industry as a whole.

Cloudera filed for an IPO to sell stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “CLDR” late last month, and yesterday it announced that it would sell 15 million shares of common stock at a public price of $15 per share, with an option to sell an addition 2.25 million shares.

The stock opened at about $17.87 and quickly rose to $19.19 under heavy trading before settling down to close at $18, representing a tidy 20% gain for the investors on day one of Cloudera‘s life as a public company.

Based on the closing price, Cloudera has market valuation of $2.3 billion. While that’s considerably more than its closest competitor – Hortonworks IPO’ed in late 2014 and now has a market cap of about $670 million – it’s significantly less than the $4.1 billion valuation that Cloudera held when Intel took an 18% stake in the company with a $740 million investment.

Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly brushed off those details during an interview on CNBC today from the floor of the NYSE.

“What’s exciting is even before…our IPO, we were a fully funded company,” Reilly said. “With the proceeds of the IPO, it gives us greater flexibility to look long term, look at this big market, and make sure we remain the market leader by making the right investments and having the right partnerships and looking long term.”

Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly was interviewed on CNBC today (Source: CNBC)

The cloud figures to play prominently in Cloudera’s strategy, according to Reilly. “Some of biggest investments are developing capabilities in the cloud,” he told the CNBC crew. “And the fastest growing part of the business is adoption of our ecology in the cloud. That’s why we’re so excited about our partnerships with Amazon and Microsoft and now even with Google.”

Cloudera’s IPO also caught the eye of several independent big data software firms who partner with the Hadoop distributor, including Trifacta and Pentaho.

” As a pioneer in next generation analytics platforms, Cloudera has been key to extracting value from data for many organizations,” Trifacta CEO Adam Wilson told Datanami via email. “This next phase of growth for the company also signals a maturation in the data space. Enterprises are graduating from experimentation to actually implementing analytics done on large data lakes, and they’re noticing impressive ROIs.”

While Hadoop has faced its share of growing pains, Wilson is bullish on the yellow elephant’s ability to help companies extract value from data in ways that other platforms can’t.

“As companies modernize their analytics platforms to scale with the pace of today’s business, Hadoop continues to be a center piece of analytics strategies,” Wilson said. “With Hadoop evolving alongside the open source community, which is increasingly consumed by machine learning, self-service analytics and cloud, we’ll continue to see adoption of solutions that facilitate the data supply chain, such as data preparation.”

Rosanne Saccone, chief marketing officer at Pentaho, which is owned by Hitachi, was also pleased to see Cloudera become a public company.

“Cloudera is a prime example of a company that’s been able to capitalize on the power of open source and Hadoop to help enterprise customers make the most of their data in real time,” Saccone told Datanami via email. “As the digital universe continues to grow exponentially, companies are seeing more value from technologies like Hadoop for enterprise use cases that require a new set of data platforms, data orchestration and data analytics tools.”

Related Items:

Cloudera IPO Reflects Hadoop Shifts

Hadoop Has Failed Us, Tech Experts Say

Intel Exits Hadoop Market, Throws In with Cloudera

Datanami