Cloudera Job Cuts a 'Difficult Decision' Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

Cloudera, the enterprise data cloud company, confirmed job cuts in direct response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The company wouldn’t say how many jobs it cut or where those employees work. Cloudera is based in Palo Alto, California.

Cloudera provided the following statement to Channel Partners regarding the job cuts:

Channel Partners asked Cloudera how many people it is laying off, but the company wasn’t specific about the number.

“COVID-19’s sustained disruption to the global economy has prompted Cloudera to perform a comprehensive analysis to identify ways we can adjust our organization to persevere through the crisis. Unfortunately, we made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount, effective May 5.”

According to its latest annual report, Cloudera’s full-time workforce was more than 2,700 on Jan. 31. Of those, more than 1,400 are in the United States and another 1,300 are in international locations.

None of Cloudera’s employees is represented by a labor union or covered by collective bargaining agreements.

In January, Cloudera appointed Robert Bearden as president and CEO. He was co-founder and CEO of Hortonworks, which merged with Cloudera in 2019.

Cloudera will announce its next quarterly earnings on June 3. For its 2020 fiscal year, it reported a $336 million loss, nearly double its $192 million loss the previous year.

Cloudera’s competitors are some of the big boys in cloud: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, HP, IBM, Oracle and Teradata.

Last November, Cloudera launched its enhanced partner program, Cloudera Connect. It is designed to help partners innovate faster, grow the machine learning and analytics markets, and build profitable businesses. Its partners include system integrators and consultants, ISVs, resellers, MSPs, and cloud and hardware platforms.

Cloudera isn’t the only company in the channel laying off workers. Last month, FireEye confirmed it is laying off employees as part of a restructuring process planned long before the pandemic. The cybersecurity vendor is cutting 6% of its workforce, or 204 employees. Most of the FireEye layoffs affect employees working in mature appliance-based product areas.