Less than three years after acquiring rival Hortonworks in a deal valued at more than $5 billion, enterprise data cloud provider Cloudera this week said it will be acquired by a pair of private investment firms for a similar amount. Cloudera also is acquiring data analytics firms Datacoral and Cazena.

Cloudera is being taken private by affiliates of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and KKR. The all-cash deal is for $16 per share and valued at around $5.3 billion. Cloudera had been trading at around $12.88 per share prior to the deal being announced and had vacillated between $9.34 and $19.35 per share over the past year.

"This transaction provides substantial and certain value to our shareholders while also accelerating Cloudera’s long-term path to hybrid cloud leadership for analytics that span the complete data lifecycle – from the edge to AI,” Cloudera CEO Rob Bearden noted in a statement on the deal. “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."

Cloudera’s purchase of Hortonworks combined Cloudera’s focus on data warehousing and machine learning with Hortonworks efforts in data management. The combination was a stronger competitor to larger rivals in the space, like Talend, Oracle, IBM, Paxata, and Denodo Technologies.

That competitive positioning was on display as part of Cloudera’s most recent earnings, which were released alongside its latest announcement. Cloudera reported a 7% year-over-year increase in revenues for its first fiscal quarter of 2022, and a 30% drop in net losses for the quarter. For its most recent fiscal year, Cloudera reported a nearly 10% increase in revenues to $869 million and slashed its net losses in half.

However, Cloudera has been a money-losing venture since it went public in mid-2017. And it was noted in this week’s acquisition announcement that “entities related to” Carl Icahn’s Icahn Group collectively held around 18% of Cloudera’s outstanding shares and had agreed to vote in favor of the deal. Icahn has a history of throwing his stock holdings behind the financial decisions of those companies.

Cloudera Now Private, Deals for SaaS

In addition to going private, Cloudera is picking up software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors Datacoral and Cazena. Cloudera noted that the deals provide it with a SaaS model that can tie into its legacy big data offerings.

Datacoral offers a fully managed platform that allows users to extract data from various data sources that can then be orchestrated using SQL. That platform will be integrated into Cloudera’s big data platform (CDP).

Cazena’s SaaS platform uses end-to-end infrastructure and orchestration that allows users to migrate their data from a data lake into a public cloud. For Cloudera, this will allow customers to move their data into CDP for the public cloud.

Financial details of those deals were not released.