Hadoop distributor MapR aiming for late 2015 IPO
CEO John Schroeder believes Hadoop market is becoming more mature as he prepares to float company
MapR, the Hadoop distribution that competes with Cloudera and HortonWorks, is eyeing a late 2015 initial public offering, according to its founder and CEO John Schroeder.
The firm is looking to exploit the hype around the Hadoop data management market which has seen MapR's competition already make its mark; Cloudera received a $740m investment from Intel for 18 per cent of its business in March 2014 - which valued the start-up at about $4.1bn at the time, while HortonWorks pushed closer to its own IPO after revealing in December that its shares will be offered at $16 each, with the expectation that it will raise some $100m on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. That pricing values the Yahoo spin-off at $665m.
Schroeder explained that MapR, which counts Experian and Samsung as part of its 700+ customer base, is working towards its goal of going public in 2015.
"We feel like we're still on track for something late in 2015," he told Fortune.
"We're having a fantastic [fourth] quarter. Enterprise software tends to be very backend-loaded, meaning that we do about 80 per cent of our bookings in the third month of a three-month quarter. [This quarter], we came into December with over 70 per cent done, so things are going well," he said.
And the firm has made moves to prepare for an IPO too - by bringing in what Schroeder calls "a public company-quality CFO" almost a year ago.
Schroeder was referring to Dan Atler, who has managed three companies including Silicon Image through successful IPOs. He most recently served as CFO for Meraki, a cloud networking and security firm acquired by Cisco.
Schroeder believes the biggest obstacle for the firm is market maturity, but he said that this is changing. He suggested that firms didn't know what use cases they would need Hadoop for, but that now the conversation has shifted and become more specific.
IDC predicts that this year, the big data market will be worth $27bn (£16bn), of which $6bn (£4bn) will be driven by Hadoop.