Cloudera, leading Hadoop startups that acquired HortonWorks, went private as private equity firms KKR and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice announced their plan to purchase Cloudera for $5.3 billion. The company has a market cap of around $3.7 billion.
As modern technologies like data lakes started replacing Hadoop in the big data analytics space, Cloud era lost its market edge. The company also realised the gaining momentum of cloud players and its ecosystem partners.
The transaction that is finalised now gives a premium of 24% for shareholders at $16 a share. As per the market opening statistics, Cloudera stock was trading at $12.86.
Besides becoming a private company, Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden came up with some structural changes in the organisation to take on the changing dynamics in the big data self-service market.
“We believe that as a private company with the expertise and support of experienced investors such as CD&R and KKR, Cloudera will have the resources and flexibility to drive product-led growth and expand our addressable market opportunity,” Bearden said in a statement.
As part of its effort to take on challenges, Rob Bearden came up with modernisation plan with strategic acquisition and technology shift in Cloudera. The company announced a couple of acquisitions like Datacoral, a startup that abstracts away the infrastructure needed to build a data pipeline without using code.
It also acquired Cazena, a startup that helps customers build cloud data lakes, giving the company a more modern approach to processing big data. Bearden sees both of these services helping Cloudera reposition itself in the big data self-service market
“Both businesses will enable our combined customers to enjoy a reduction in complexity and faster time to value for their data initiatives, leading to improved insights, faster innovation, and stronger engagements with their customers and partners,” Rob Bearden said in a statement.
Cloudera went public in 2018, closing at $18.09 a share after raising a $1 billion. The vast majority of that was a $740 million investment from Intel Capital in 2014. Hortonworks raised another $248 million.
KKR and CD&R is expected to close the deal in the second half of this year subject to typical regulatory review. KKR has already widened its IT portfolio by the recent acquisition of Mphasis and other investments.
