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According to a report published by SNS Research late last year, the global Big Data hardware, software, and professional services markets were estimated to grow to $57 billion last year. The researcher estimates that through the period 2020, the market will grow 10% annually to $76 billion. Big Data vendor and Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) listed last year. But the company has had a choppy run in the public market so far.

Cloudera’s Financials

Cloudera recently announced its third quarter results. Revenues grew 41% over the year to $94.6 million, ahead of the market’s forecast of $91.3 million. It reported third-quarter net loss of $55.3 million, or $0.40 per share, compared with loss of $44 million, or $1.20 per share, reported a year ago. During the quarter, adjusted loss came in at $0.17 per share, compared with the Street’s estimate of a net loss of $0.24 per share.

Subscriptions revenues grew 48% to $78.1 million and accounted for 83% of total revenues compared with 78% a year ago. Services revenues grew 13% over the year to $16.5 million.  It added 23 net new Global 8000 customers in the quarter.

For the current quarter, analysts expect the company to report revenues of $97.3 million and adjusted losses of $0.26 per share. Cloudera announced a forecast of revenues of $97-$99 million with adjusted losses of $0.24-$0.22 per share.

Cloudera’s Product Expansion

Cloudera continues to improve its product offerings to attain market growth. Last quarter, it launched the Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX), a software framework of data management that simplifies the development of multi-function data apps and makes them safer and less expensive to deploy. The solution works across cloud, multi-cloud, and on-premises deployments and uses the same data regardless of where it resides to achieve this goal.

It also introduced Cloudera Altus Analytic DB, a Platform-as-a-Service offering, which is the first data warehouse cloud service that brings the warehouse to the data. The solution will allow enterprises to perform self-service business intelligence and SQL analytic workloads in the cloud.

Despite the product innovations, the market is not too pleased with Cloudera. Some believe that the company is “likely to die a slow death” as its offerings fail to impress customers and the financials continue to bleed. When Cloudera entered the market, it may have been a pioneer within the Hadoop segment. But over the past few years, bigger players like Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Google, have all released their Hadoop offerings. To counter their growth, smaller players like Cloudera, have had little choice but to engage in a price war – a move that could make Cloudera’s profitability a distant dream.

Cloudera had listed on the stock exchange last April at $15 with a valuation of $2.3 billion. It is currently trading at $18.14 with a market capitalization of $2.6 billion. It had touched a high of $23.35 in May last year, and had fallen to a low of $14.50 in October.

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