Cloudera updates core technology to solicit clients from corporate AI markets

Two years after being taken private in a $4.7 billion deal, data analytics firm Cloudera has overhauled its core technology to go after the booming artificial intelligence market and is profitable, the firm’s new chief told Reuters.

Founded in 2008 by Silicon Valley veterans, Cloudera came from an early generation of companies who sought to sift through huge stores of corporate information, long before the current AI systems that can read that data and write about it in human-like ways.

The company went public in 2017, but struggled to turn a profit and was taken private by Clayton Dubilier & Rice and KKR.

Charles Sansbury, who became Cloudera’s CEO in August, said the company has completed a re-working of its core systems and now has more than $1 billion in annual revenue and operating profits “in the hundreds of millions of dollars”.

The sales figure puts Cloudera at about half the size of its publicly traded rival Snowflake, which had $2 billion in revenue for its most recent fiscal year.

Cloudera also competes with DataBricks, a privately held startup that was valued at $43 billion in September.

All three companies are hoping big corporations will want to keep at least some of their data inside their own firewalls for privacy and security reasons, rather than handing it over to cloud computing partners to take advantage of new AI technology.

Sansbury told Reuters that Cloudera is helping customers in tightly regulated industries like finance prepare their data to do their own AI work.

“If you think about what it takes to plow a field, you’ve got a big pile of dirt. There’s some rocks in there. You’re going to dump in maybe some fertilizer and some soil nutrients. You plow it all up and you’ve put it into nice rows. And at that point, it’s ready to plant,” Sansbury said.

“But a lot of the work is foundational in its nature, getting those rows ready.”