100% Y/Y Software Revenue Growth at Cloudera for FY15

Cloudera, Inc., in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, shared its views on the state of the Hadoop market and ecosystem.

At recent industry events, CEO, Tom Reilly, and chief strategy officer and co-founder, Mike Olson, discussed the Hadoop industry’s momentum, advances in ecosystem development and customer success in extracting value from big data. In particular, the executives outlined community initiatives in 2015 to ensure performance, security, and manageability of Apache Hadoop for increased enterprise use.

Furthermore, Reilly reviewed Cloudera’s business results for fiscal 2015(1), reflecting enterprises around the globe benefitting across a multitude of use cases from the power of Hadoop and embracing it as central to their data management strategies. As the market share leader in enterprise Hadoop, Cloudera is regarded by industry experts as the benchmark for Hadoop adoption and commercial success. As such, Cloudera reports strong performance based on the work of the Apache community, Cloudera’s ecosystem of partners, a growing customer base, and Cloudera’s dedicated global team.

“Fiscal 2015 marked an extraordinary year for Cloudera and the industry. We made strides across all areas of our business, and drove accelerated adoption of Hadoop within the enterprise through our commitment to and collaboration with the Apache Hadoop community,” said Reilly. “We are proud to employ and collaborate with Apache Hadoop innovators to deliver cutting edge technology that is disrupting the status quo while enabling data-driven business transformation for our customers. We expanded around the globe, and went much deeper into vertical markets to deliver the most secure and robust platform for big data and to unlock new use cases – which leads to tremendous business value for our customers. We are excited about our success, and commend the broader community on the growth of Hadoop and the impact it is delivering.”

Cloudera shares its fiscal 2015 business results(2):

• Annual recurring subscription software revenue(3) growth accelerated year over year to approximately 100%
• Preliminary unaudited total revenue surpassed $100 million
• Total enterprise subscription software customers(4) grew by more than 85% to approximately 525; approximately 250 new logo customers were added
• The Cloudera partner ecosystem expanded beyond 1,450 companies, including new or enhanced partnerships with EMC Isilon, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, TCS and Teradata

“Accelerating growth in the Hadoop market and in our own business can be directly attributed to the introduction of the enterprise data hub, now representing more than 60% of new business for Cloudera,” said Olson. “In fact, our customers adopting an EDH are renewing and expanding their use of Hadoop at a faster rate than ever as they see increased value from big data.“

An enterprise data hub (EDH) is a ‘reference architecture’ that defines a new data management platform built around Hadoop. The power of an EDH stems from its integration with existing systems – databases, enterprise data warehouses, data integration tools, and analytic applications. In this regard, an EDH complements existing systems, allowing enterprises to optimize where workloads occur and enabling access and analysis of all an enterprise’s data.

Advances with the Open Source Ecosystem and Community
“In 2014, the community focused especially hard on security and enabling real-time, interactive and streaming applications to function elegantly with Hadoop, such that enterprises can execute multi-workload, multi-application analytics seamlessly and securely,” said Olson. “Cloudera is proud to have contributed to these advancements and we are dedicated to continued innovation and leadership in Hadoop open source software development, working with the Apache Software Foundation to foster the Hadoop ecosystem.”

Having grown the company to more than 800 employees, Cloudera now has more committer seats across all the Hadoop ecosystem projects than any other vendor, and continues to attract the open source developers.

To illustrate, Olson described some of the community’s recent efforts. In order to elevate the importance of security, Cloudera continued to innovate on Apache Sentry, and through its acquisition of Gazzang and its partnership with Intel Corp., led the optimization of Hadoop for chip-level encryption, making it possible for all data in Hadoop to be encrypted with little performance degradation. This innovation enabled MasterCard to meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards and achieve PCI compliance on Cloudera’s enterprise data hub, the first Hadoop installation to earn this certification.

Similarly, the company led the introduction of a new version of Impala, an open source interactive SQL engine that allows end users to query data stored in Hadoop using industry standard applications. As an example, Olson commented on a firm in healthcare IT, Cerner  Corp., and its recent announcement that it had implemented an EDH to create a holistic understanding of the healthcare system to improve patient outcomes. Cerner indicated that insight from its Hadoop-powered big data initiatives had saved hundreds of lives.

“We are honored to have contributed to the type of data-driven social impact that is resulting from the efforts of Cerner and others,” he said.

Since 2005, Cloudera employees have founded or co-founded 20 Hadoop ecosystem projects(5) and plays a large ongoing role in many others, including Spark and YARN.

Partner Program Grows by 640, Surpassing 1,450
Cloudera expanded its partner program, Cloudera Connect, by 78% during the year, ensuring that its customers have access to complete, integrated solutions that interoperate with their existing data management infrastructure. In fiscal 2015, Cloudera announced partnerships with Accenture, Capgemini, Dell, EMC Isilon, Informatica, Intel, Microsoft, MongoDB, NEC, Red Hat, SAP, Teradata, and others to accelerate the deployment of Hadoop.

“It was an incredible year for Cloudera, the Apache Hadoop community, our partners and, most importantly, our customers who are experiencing benefit and gaining tremendous business value from their big data initiatives. We look forward to driving further innovation and collaboration with the community in the year ahead,” said Reilly.

(1) Fiscal year ended January 31, 2015.
(2) The estimated range of our financial results and operating metrics for the year ended January 31, 2015 are preliminary, based upon our estimates and subject to completion of customary financial and operating closing procedures.
(3) Subscription software revenue comprised approximately 67% of total revenue in fiscal 2015.
(4) An enterprise subscription software customer is defined as an enterprise or organization from which Cloudera currently earns annual recurring software revenue. Each customer is counted only once, regardless of the number of divisions, subsidiaries and related entities that may have subscription software agreements with Cloudera. Professional services and training only customers are excluded.
(5) Apache Avro, Apache Bigtop, Apache Crunch, Apache Flume, Apache Hadoop Core (HDFS, MapReduce), Apache MRUnit, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, Hue, Impala, Impyla, Kite SDK, Oryx, Pandas, Apache Parquet (incubating), Apache Sentry (incubating), Apache Lucene, Apache Sqoop, Apache Whirr, Apache ZooKeeper.