According to a Research and Markets report, the global Hadoop market was valued at $26.74 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow at 38% CAGR to $340.35 billion by 2027. Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) is a leading player in the market that continues to deliver strong quarterly results. The company has been expanding its offerings by adding new products and acquiring smaller players.

Cloudera’s Financials

Cloudera’s recently reported third-quarter revenues grew 10% to $217.9 million, significantly ahead of the market’s forecast of $201.79 million. Net loss was $0.04 per share compared with a net loss of $0.29 per share a year ago. On an adjusted basis, net income was $0.15 per share, which was better than the market’s forecast of net income of $0.09 per share.

During the quarter, subscription revenues grew 18% to $197.4 million and services revenues fell 34.5% to $20.5 million.

For the current quarter, Cloudera forecast revenues of $219-$222 million with an earnings forecast ranging from of $0.10-$0.12. It expects to end the current year with revenues of $862-$865 million and a net income of $0.40-$0.42 per share. The market was looking for revenues of $215.43 million for the quarter with a net income of $0.10 per share and revenues of $849.77 million for the year with a net income of $0.33 per share.

Cloudera’s Acquisition

During the quarter, Cloudera announced its acquisition of Texas-based Eventador.io. Eventador.io is a PaaS-based streaming data engine on Apache Flink and Kafka. Founded in February of 2016 by Erik Beebe and Kenny Gorman, Eventador.io enables SQL queries to be performed on data streams. It was set up to make it simpler to build streaming applications built on real-time data. Traditionally, this process involves a lot of coding with Java, Scala or similar technologies. Eventador, on the other hand, simplified the process by allowing users to use SQL to query streams of real-time data without implementing complex codes.

The acquisition will provide Cloudera with the capability to offer containerized services for Kafka, NiFi, and Flink and provide the most complete solution set in the market. It will help Cloudera better support customer needs, especially those related to cross-organizational access to real-time data. This capability will enhance Cloudera’s Data Platform offering and will deliver material improvements within the DataFlow experience. The Eventador acquisition shows how Cloudera is becoming more focused on providing solutions in data management analytics market.

Prior to the acquisition, Eventador.io had raised $3.8 million in two rounds of funding from investors including Capital Factory, Keshif Ventures, RSH Ventures, LiveOak Venture Partners, Deep Space Ventures, AKF Partners, Justin Stottlemyer, and Akash Garg. Terms of the acquisition or Eventador.io’s financials prior to the acquisition are not disclosed.

Besides growth through acquisitions, Cloudera is also growing through product releases. Recently, it announced three upcoming public cloud services, CDP data engineering, CDP operational database, and CDP data visualization. The new services have been created for data specialists, data engineers, data analysts, and data scientists and are focused on helping these data engineers work quicker and more intelligently.

Cloudera has had Altus, a PaaS solution, since 2017. It allows users to analyze and process data at scale in public cloud infrastructures and provides a multi-cloud PaaS solution that automates massive-scale data engineering and data warehouse workloads in the public cloud. It gives end users complete control over which cloud resources Altus clusters can use without giving access to data in their cloud account. Cloudera has over 3,000 software and system integration partners offering various solutions ranging from customer analytics, security and compliance, IoT products, and architecture modernization. Refer to my recent article Cloud Stocks: Which SaaS Players Will Win in PaaS to get more insights into the PaaS landscape.

Last year, the market was abuzz with rumors about Cloudera’s possible acquisition. Analysts expected interest from private equity players and even IBM in a possible acquisition. I still think that an acquisition by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft would probably be a better outcome. Cloudera could fit well with Amazon’s hybrid multi-cloud strategy.

Its stock is trading at $14.02 with a market capitalization of $4.1 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 $15.50 in December last year.

Cloudera listed in 2017 when it raised $225 million by selling stock at $15 apiece. In almost four years since listing, its stock price hasn’t changed much. In these last four years, revenue growth has decelerated from more than 40% in 2018 to barely reaching double digits this year. The company has tried to accelerate growth through acquisitions – the most notable one being that of Hortonworks. While the Hortonworks acquisition helped grow its topline for a brief period, growth has stalled since. The company does not appear to have a vision towards profitability and appears to be counting on acquisitions to continue to steer growth.