A Murky IPO In Store For Cloudera?

Cloudera (Pending:CLDR) filed an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission for its initial public offering. The company intends to offer 15 million shares at a price range of $12 to $14. It has an additional 2,250,000 shares over-allotted as an option for its underwriters. The underwriters for the offering are Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Allen & Company LLC, BofA Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank Securities, Stifel, JMP Securities and Raymond James.

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Business overview

Cloudera is based in Palo Alto, California and was founded in 2008. It pioneered its open-source platform, Hadoop, which is used by 18 percent of the global 8000 companies in the cloud. The company’s platform takes complex data problems, breaks them down into many smaller pieces and then integrates them into a whole to arrive at fast answers to complex issues.

In May 2014, Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) invested $766 million in Cloudera at a price of $30.92 per share, taking a 22 percent stake. Since the high end of its marketed price range for its IPO is $14 per share, this means that Intel’s investment has dropped in value by 56 percent to around $348 million at the upper end of the price range.

Executive management overview

Thomas J. Reilly has served as the chief executive officer and as a member of the board of directors of Cloudera since June 2013. Prior to that, he worked as a vice president of enterprise security for Hewlett-Packard Company from Nov. 2010 to April 2012 and as the CEO of Arcsight Inc. from Dec. 2006 to May 2011. He has a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael A. Olson is a co-founder of the company. He served as its CEO from its founding in Aug. 2008 until June 2013. He currently serves as Cloudera’s chief strategy officer and as the chairman of the board of directors. He has held executive-level positions at several technology companies since 1998. Olson holds a Bachelor of Arts in computer science and a Master of Science in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.