HDP - Guidance

How do you reconcile that with HDP’s revenue being up 51% for the year, and billings being up 63%?

I don’t get the desire for reconciliation here. Just because most organizations are not considering Hadoop at this time doesn’t rule out that more are doing so than have before. A perhaps silly argument might be that if 17% of orgs were using HDP last year, then a 51% increase might mean that 26% are doing so today. The reality is that Gartner was looking at the overall market trend, not a particular company in that space, so there’s no way any of those numbers are real. I suppose you could try a spin it that Hortonworks is doing better than the Hadoop market as a whole, but I wouldn’t try to support or deny that claim based on what we’ve read so far.

This article, Hadoop Finds A Happier Home In The Cloud, just came out earlier today: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3170127/analytics/hadoop-fi…

Not only did 2016 see only a small increase in Hadoop deployments, but the pipeline leading into deployment fell across the board. … In sum, big data has yielded big hype, but not yet big success.

Well, that’s not quite true. Hortonworks, for example, recently had a strong quarter, growing revenue 39 percent year over year. In 2016, the company did nearly $200 million in revenue, $126 million of it derived from subscriptions to its Hadoop platform.

Part of this success for Hortonworks, however, probably comes down to its increasing embrace of the cloud. As noted on its earnings call, roughly 25 percent of Hortonworks customers now run its software in the public cloud, up from approximately 0 percent two years ago. This is where developers want to run their software, and appeasing them is smart business.

While this shift to the cloud likely favors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure far more than it helps Hortonworks, Cloudera, or MapR, it’s a rising tide that will tend to lift all boats. It also may save them from leaking.

1 Like

They have similar arrangement with AWS. In fact HDP announced today an alliance with IBM storage division. Like I said, the ecosystem is such that you are going to see companies compete and co-operate.

Here is the link… http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/CRM-Featured…

They have similar arrangement with AWS.

The deal Hortonworks has with Microsoft is unlike what it’s doing with either Amazon or IBM. The branding is Microsoft’s, not Hortonwork’s, and Microsoft pays only a portion of the money to Hortonworks. For Amazon, customers buy a Hortonworks branded component (via Amazon’s marketplace, for instance: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B01LXOQBOU), and presumably the lion’s share of the money goes to Hortonworks. I’m not familiar with how the IBM/Hortonworks partnership is structured, but it doesn’t appear that you can buy an IBM branded version of Hortonworks like you can a Microsoft branded version.

The deal Hortonworks has with Microsoft is unlike what it’s doing with either Amazon or IBM

There are nuances for sure. The important point is HDP is available in all cloud (IaaS) platforms and the cloud providers see the benefit of offering HDP on their platforms because they address a segment that is not serviced either by their own solution or see a demand from their customers who prefer HDP over their own solutions.

…the cloud providers see the benefit of offering HDP on their platforms because they address a segment that is not serviced either by their own solution or see a demand from their customers who prefer HDP over their own solutions.

The cynic in me thinks that they offer HDP because it costs them almost nothing to do so (Hortonworks does the work), so they might as well offer it and see what sticks.

That’s what makes the unique Microsoft arrangement interesting. Unlike Amazon or IBM, which just offer it as an “app” to choose, Microsoft apparently wanted a branded, fully integrated solution. So, I’d guess the Microsoft believes in it more than the other two. Presumable, Microsoft also provides at least first line support and other services. This reduces the percentage of money Hortonworks gets to keep, but after the first integration effort, it’s probably mostly free money to them. A smaller piece of a larger pie and all…

1 Like