INTC Intel Corporation

By Rolfe Winkler 

Big-data software company Cloudera Inc. filed paperwork to go public on Friday, revealing a business that is growing quickly but possibly not fast enough to deliver gains to its big investor Intel Corp.

Cloudera, based in Palo Alto, Calif., sells software and services that help customers analyze oceans of digital information flowing from networked devices. Its technology is built upon an open-source project called Hadoop that was developed to store and run computing processes across many different computers.

For the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, Cloudera's revenue rose 57% from a year earlier to about $261 million.

Cloudera will inevitably be compared to rival Hortonworks Inc., another Hadoop software specialist with a different business model, that went public in December 2014. Based on where Hortonworks trades on the public market, Cloudera's revenue and growth rate are unlikely to justify matching the $4.1 billion valuation that Intel stamped on the company in 2014 when the chip giant invested $740 million. Half of that money went to Cloudera and the other half to buy shares from early investors and company executives.

Hortonworks's share price has fallen over 60% since the first day of trading, pulling its market value down to just above $600 million. Compared with Cloudera, Hortonworks has about two-thirds the revenue, as well as a similar growth rate and gross profit margin. It now trades at about three times last year's revenue of $184 million, excluding cash on its balance sheet.

--Jay Greene contributed to this article.

Write to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 31, 2017 15:52 ET (19:52 GMT)

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