What you missed in Big Data: Hortonworks IPO stokes Hadoop fans
The analytics market passed a historic milestone last week when Hortonworks Inc. became the first Hadoop distributor to go public, beating rivals Cloudera Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc. to the punch. But all three companies can take heart in the first-day performance of the HDP stock, which soared past the initial $16 target price to close at $26.38, leaving its valuation comfortably above $1 billion.
Yet while Hortonworks may have won the race to the stock exchange, a hard road still lies ahead to monetizing enterprise demand for the batch processing framework. During the first nine months of 2014, the firm generated a meager $24 million in gross billings from 233 customers. In contrast, MapR’s claims three times that many customers and Cloudera is estimated to be worth $4 billion based on its venture funding. The $100 million in cash that Hortonworks raised during the IPO could help narrow the gap.
Accel Partners is hoping that the $50 million round it led in DataGravity Inc. earlier last week will serve the same purpose for the emerging array maker and help it take on the deeply-entranced giants of the storage industry.
The startup has developed a series of appliances with built-in analytics functionality that enables organizations to make sense of Big Data at the point of storage. Its homegrown data management system automatically distinguishes important and non-important files, tracks who accesses what and when and automatically connects users with subject matter experts from other parts of their organizations if they need assistance deciphering a particular document.
Venture capitalists aren’t the only one making bets on Big Data, though. Cisco Systems, Inc. also jumped into the fray last week with an analytics portfolio geared specifically towards helping organizations take better advantage of data from the edge of the network. The company’s novel pitch is that edge-based analytics make it possible for customers to detect certain kinds of problems and opportunities faster by eliminating the need to shuttle data back and forth to servers.
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