Hadoop software company Hortonworks priced its initial public offering on Thursday at $16. That’s an increase of 23 percent over the midpoint of the company’s initial estimate, which valued its shares at $12 to $14. Hortonworks will start trading Friday morning on the Nasdaq under the ticker HDP.
However, the company caused minor shockwaves in November when it filed paperwork to go public. It’s not so much the IPO that surprised people — Hortonworks, as well as blood rivals Cloudera and MapR, have all discussed impending IPOs — but rather the timing. As Hortonworks lays out in its SEC S-1 form, the business of selling Hadoop is still a long, hard and capital-intensive process.
Industry analysts and investors wasted no time poring over the company’s paperwork and finding reasons to be worried about its revenue, profits and customer counts.
Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden has a different take on the matter. Numbers aside, he sees Hadoop as a market ready to explode and Hortonworks as a company ready to capitalize on it. Here’s what he had to say during an interview with Gigaom last month.
Hadoop is no longer a question
It’s not yet ubiquitous, but Bearden thinks Hadoop has already crossed an important inflection point in that companies are no longer asking themselves whether they’ll deploy Hadoop. The decision to deploy is now a “predetermined assumption,” he said, and the only real question is “how much, how fast.” They’re willing to make significant commitments in Hadoop environments because they’re now confident it will benefit them in some way.
“The enterprise sees the functional and economic value that Hadoop enables them to achieve,” Bearden explained.
Data on how on true this worldview is paints a conflicting picture. On the one hand, some analysts claim many CIOs are (somehow) still very confused about what Hadoop is and where it fits into their data strategies. On the other hand, some surveys show big data adoption and planning are picking up — and Hadoop is usually considered a very big part any big data strategy.
From a Gartner survey asking respondents about their companies’ stage of big data adoption. Source: Gartner
Data lakes and new applications are coming next
However, getting companies to adopt Hadoop at all is just the first step. Bearden thinks the next big inflection point will come as companies move their Hadoop deployments outside of department-level clusters and start spreading them across the whole company. He, like a handful of other big data companies, uses the (sometimes-criticized) term “data lake” to describe the resulting architecture, which ideally is a large Hadoop Distributed File System environment storing data from many different applications across many different departments.