Yahoo!-backed Hadoop biz Hortonworks flings itself at the stock market

Re: Makes you wonder what cloudera are worth.

The pure cash value of Intel's investment put them at c. $5bn, but the transaction also involved a substantial transfer of IP and staff to Cloudera, so they were worth a big chunk more than that. They'll be worth even more now - their win rate is on the order of 90% and their upsell rate is on the order of 75%, usually before the initial license is up and usually for more than double the initial purchase of licenses.

Speaking as a platform-agnostic SI employee partnered with all 3, Hortonworks and MapR are minnows*. MapR get by cannibalising parts of the storage market (rather than the EDW market) and Hortonworks get by through cross-selling on the back of MS and small-scale deals. Neither of those strategies are sustainable and neither of those companies have a clear value-add differentiator, and it shows in their marketing materials; thinly veiled attacks on competitors, outdated technology comparisons, and dodgy-as-sin benchmarks.

Cloudera approached the market differently. While maintaining their shiny west coast hippy exterior, they poached, wholesale, ex-Sun/Oracle/IBM/MS etc. engineers and sales bods and plundered their little black books, touting their closed-source-but-damned-excellent Enterprise products. That's why they dominate financial services and government, and more than a few web companies who you wouldn't expect to be customers of anyone in this space.

*Don't even ask about Pivotal.

Re: Dr Seuss

You bastard! :)

Beat me to it!

Upvoted.