Cloudera's Q2 solid as Cloud Data Platform aims for multi-cloud, hybrid deployments

Cloudera's fiscal second quarter results were ahead of expectations as the company as demand for its Cloudera Data Platform offset weaker IT spending due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company reported second quarter revenue of $214.3 million, up 9% from a year ago, with non-GAAP earnings of 10 cents a share. Cloudera reported a second quarter net loss of 12 cents a share.

CEO Rob Bearden said the general availability of the Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud gives the company access to the hybrid and multi-cloud markets. The Cloudera Data Platform Public Cloud is available via the AWS Marketplace.

Bearden said:

We more than doubled the number of CDP Public Cloud customers in the quarter and had a similarly strong bookings result. Although recognized revenue is currently modest, we are encouraged by market reception to CDP Public Cloud. These offerings are differentiated as discrete services and will scale over time. CDP Public Cloud's immediate strategic value lies primarily in its enablement of hybrid data architectures, playing an essential role in creating an Enterprise Data Cloud for our customers.

While Cloudera may compete with public cloud giants such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS, Bearden argued that the company is more partner than rival. 

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Bearden added:

Since we expect the development of enterprise data clouds among our customer base to drive increased public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service consumption, CDP Private Cloud fuels our public cloud partnerships with AWS, Azure and Google. We estimate that the cloud providers will generate 4 to 5 dollars in compute and storage revenue for every dollar of software revenue earned by Cloudera. This potential IaaS revenue is the focus of our hyperscale cloud partners and drives our interactions with them.

As for the outlook, Cloudera projected fiscal third quarter revenue of $207 million to $210 million with non-GAAP earnings of 8 cents a share to 10 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting revenue of $205.5 million in the third quarter with non-GAAP earnings of 7 cents a share.

For fiscal 2021, Cloudera is projecting revenue of $839 million to $853 million and non-GAAP earnings of 32 cents a share to 35 cents a share. That outlook was above expectations for non-GAAP earnings of 28 cents a share on revenue of $838.7 million.

The company said that the outlook assumes the "recessionary impact" of COVID-19 will continue through the fourth quarter.

Bearden said:

We are not immune to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19, but we believe our business is more resilient than most enterprise software companies'. This is true because our offerings support digital transformation initiatives and mission critical use cases. In addition, our sales organization has been effective in engaging and supporting customers remotely.

Cloudera had 1,007 customers who exceeded $100,000 of annual recurring revenue (ARR) and 172 customers had ARR of more than $1 million.