As companies make a move for their initial public offering (IPO), the investor page goes up, the bell gets rung on the NYSE, and, perhaps most importantly, their financial results have to be displayed for all to see.
Cloudera and Okta, two companies who declared their intentions to go public within weeks of each other in April, have announced their second quarter 2018 financial results, with both companies beating expectations.
Cloudera, a big data software provider, announced total revenues of $89.8 million (£68.1m) for the quarter ending July 31, a claimed 39% increase from this time last year, while identity management provider Okta offered total revenues of $61 million (£46.2m), an increase of 62.9% year on year.
Speaking to analysts following the results, Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, discussed machine learning and artificial intelligence as key to the company’s future, citing a recent quote from The Economist around data being the world’s most valuable resource ahead of oil.
“The organisations that extract the most value from that raw resource will be the winners in a new data-driven economy,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Cloudera’s modern platform for machine learning analytics provides a flexible enterprise grade environment for organisations to harvest the value of data of all types, whether in the cloud or on-premises.
“Cloudera’s customers have been building machine learning analytics applications on our platform for years,” added Reilly. “Today, we have hundreds of large enterprises’ introduction of those applications, fundamentally improving the way they grow, connect and protect their businesses. We love those applications…they are simply ravenous for data.”
For Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, the company’s ‘born in the cloud’ approach means the company is ‘on the right side of history’ in the shift to greater devices, greater complexity, and greater security headaches. “We believe we are in the driver’s seat as this transformation unfolds, and Okta continues to set the standard for managing identity in the extended enterprise and transforming the customer experience,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha.
With the AI side in mind, it was also revealed that Cloudera will acquire Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company. In a post titled ‘To the Future…’, by founder Hilary Mason, said the company and the industry was ‘just getting started’ around machine learning opportunities.
“We’re delighted to join forces with a company that drives progress in the foundational technologies our work relies on,” wrote Mason. “By joining Cloudera, we will be able to bring the opportunities discovered in our research to life in new ways, at the scale of the Cloudera platform.”