Hortonworks, one of the major providers and supporters of the in-memory database software platform Hadoop, has filed for an initial public offering.
The company has not set an initial price as of yet, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and first reported by re/code. Hortonworks described its overall goal as “[establishing] Hadoop as the foundational technology of the modern enterprise data architecture.”
Hortonworks also noted that it plans to continue supporting Hadoop’s open source environment, including the Apache Software Foundation community.
“We employ a differentiated approach in that we are committed to serving the Apache Software Foundation open source ecosystem and to sharing all of our product developments with the open source community,” Hortonworks said in its filing. “We support the community for open source Hadoop, and employ a large number of core committers to the various Enterprise Grade Hadoop projects. We believe that keeping our business model free from architecture design conflicts that could limit the ultimate success of our customers in leveraging the benefits of Hadoop at scale is a significant competitive advantage.”
Hadoop has gained significant adoption momentum for big data analytics in the telecom space and across various verticals. A recent report from Allied Market Research predicts the Hadoop-as-a-service market could reach $16.1 billion in sales globally by 2020, based on a forecasted 70.8% compound annual growth rate.
Hortonworks reported that it had a net losses of $11.5 million in the year ended April 30, 2012; it said those losses had narrowed from $36.6 million in its fiscal 2013 and $46.2 million in the eight months that ended December 30, 2013. Revenues grew from $4.8 million in the eight months that ended Dec. 31, 2013 to $17.9 million in the eight-month period ending Dec. 31, 2013. Meanwhile, the company increased its employees from 171 at the end of 2012 to 524 as of Sept. 2014. It described its major competitors as Hadoop distribution vendors Cloudera and MapR Technologies, as well as companies including IBM, Oracle and Pivotal Software who also offer Hadoop implementations.
The company reported that its subscriber customer base grew from 54 in Sept. 2013 to 233 in Sept. 2014.
