Cloudera Beat Analyst Expectations in Q2

Things are starting to look up for Cloudera, which beat analyst expectations with its second quarter results announced yesterday. The distributed computing platform maker also gave investors something to cheer about with an optimistic financial forecast for the rest of fiscal 2021.

Cloudera, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CLDR, reported a non-GAAP profit of $0.10 per share for the second quarter of fiscal year 2021 ended July 31, exceeding analyst expectations by three cents. A year ago, it reported a non-GAAP loss of $.02 per share a year ago.

The Santa Clara, California software company also beat its own guidance on total revenue. The company reported $214.3 million in total revenue, a 9% increase from the same quarter last year. In June, it estimated sales would come in around $206 million to $209 million for the quarter.

Other metrics also point to improving execution at the embattled former Hadoop distributor. For instance, subscription revenue came in at $191.5 million, up 17% relative to a year ago, and gross margin on subscriptions was 89%, up from 86% last year.

The company is still losing money on a GAAP basis, although the losses are narrowing. It reported a GAAP loss of $36.5 million for 2Q21, compared to an $89.1 million loss during 2Q20. It reported operating cash flow of $32.4 million, compared to negative cash flow of $33 million in 2Q19.

Annualized recurring revenue for the trailing 12 months amounted to $739 million, which represents 12% in organic growth, according to CEO Rob Bearden. The company had more than 1,000 customers spending more than $100,000 annually with the software maker, he said.

Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden

Looking forward, Cloudera said it expects third quarter revenues to be in the $207 to $210 million range, which was above the analysts’ consensus estimate of $205.3 million. By the time fiscal year 2021 is over in January 31, 2021, the company expects to have brought in anywhere from $839 million to $853 million in total revenue. Three months ago, it was estimating fiscal year 2021 revenues to be from $825 million to $845 million.

Bearden said the company achieved a major milestone in August with the general availability of Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud, the on-prem version of the CDP platform that it introduced to the market a year ago. “Customer reception and interest in our new CDP offerings has been very encouraging so far,” Bearden said in an analyst call yesterday after the market closed.

The second quarter was “another outstanding quarter,” said Jim Frankola, the company’s CFO. “In Q2 we did have a record quarter for non-paying users of the software becoming subscribers,” he said in the analyst call.

The company held 500 workshops during the quarter to assist customers with the task of migrating legacy HDP and CDH platforms to the new Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) offering. “…[P]robably 80% of our customer base that is legacy Cloudera, Hortonworks [wants to move] to the private cloud, and then add net new workloads to the public cloud,” Bearden said.

Bearden, who previously was the CEO of Hortonworks, was brought back by the board in January 2020 to take over for the previous Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly, who was forced out in June 2019 following a dismal first quarter of fiscal 2019, in which the company lost $103 million on a non-GAAP basis.

In June of this year, Bloomberg reported that Cloudera had retained a financial advisor to explore the potential of selling the company.

Despite the positive outlook, Cloudera’s stock was trading about $2 off Tuesday’s closing, which was close to the company’s 52-week high. Tech stocks got hammered today amid a broad sell-off across all major markets. The company currently has a market capitalization around $3.4 billion.

Related Items:

Cloudera Delivers Private Cloud Amid Public Speculation of Sale

Rob Bearden Returns to Lead Cloudera’s Second Act

Cloudera Begins New Cloud Era with CDP Launch