Cloudera Files For IPO, Reveals Close Ties With Investor Intel

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Cloudera filed for its initial public offering on Friday, as the company looks to take its open source data management and analytics technology to the next level.

Cloudera develops a hybrid open source software that combines Hadoop open source technology, and its own proprietary technology in an enterprise-grade platform for data management, machine learning and advanced analytics.

The company, which counts Intel as one of its largest investors and a primary strategic technology partner, targets markets like the Internet of Things where huge amounts of data are gathered. The company claims its solution is the market's most widely adapted solution for big data.

[Related: CenturyLink, Cloudera To Jointly Develop A Big Data-As-A-Service Solution]

In the company's S-1 filing, Cloudera said it is seeking $200 million in the IPO, but that's likely a placeholder figure that will updated in subsequent filings. The offering's timing hasn't been set in stone yet, either. Online news site TechCrunch wrote that IPO filings are typically made about 15 days before a company starts its investor roadshow, making the IPO date likely to occur in late April or early May, if all goes well.

Cloudera declined to provide additional information beyond the S-1 filing.

In the filing, Cloudera reported revenue for the 12-month period ending January 31, 2017, of $261.0 million, up from $166.0 million in the prior year. The company reported a loss of $187.3 million for the most recent year, a good improvement from the loss of $203.1 million it reported for the prior year.

Nearly 77 percent of its most recent fiscal year's revenue came from software subscriptions, up from about 72 percent during the prior year.

Cloudera has over 2,500 partners providing the company's products, including hundreds of systems integrators with professional services to create custom solutions based on the Cloudera platform, according to the filing. Other partners include software and OEM vendors, data systems vendors, and platform and cloud vendors.

Cloudera has received a total of $670 million in funding to date. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cloudera's market valuation is $4.1 billion, making it one of the largest private companies in the world before its IPO.

Cloudera's largest allies and competitors are the biggest names in tech today. One of its investors, strategic partners, and customers is Intel.

The main alternatives to its platform would include any data management, machine learning and analytics offerings from public cloud giants, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Intel was an early customer of Cloudera's, and it has been a regular buyer of Cloudera's capital stock. As of January 31, Intel owned a 22 percent stake in the company.

As a customer, Intel has purchased, having purchased about $15.8 million in Cloudera subscriptions and services in the last three years.

As part of Intel's 2014 equity investment in Cloudera, the two entered into a strategic collaboration and optimization agreement, tying Cloudera's tech performance closely to Intel's most advanced chip architectures.

That agreement's primary objective is "to ensure that our solutions deliver optimal performance and security with Intel processors and platform technology. Intel and Cloudera maintain a joint product roadmap, and each company dedicates substantial resources to fulfilling this objective."

Cloudera's filing notes that its platform "achieves differentiated performance on Intel architecture today and is expected to achieve differentiated performance on future Intel platform technologies immediately upon release to customers."

Intel and Cloudera have worked closely on open source projects. The two donated Apache Spot, a machine-learning threat intelligence project, to the Apache Software Foundation.