MapR misses deadline for sale, biz prospects looking thinner than a Hadoop sales pitch MapR, the struggling Hadoop data analytics firm and one-time unicorn, has missed its 3 July deadline to sell out or shut up shop. At the end of May, MapR revealed in a WARN notice in California that it was two weeks away from closure. In the missive, CEO John Schroeder confirmed he was considering two letters of intent to buy …
Halfway surprised Cloudera still exists *and* had the pocket change to grab Hortonworks.
Apparently their financials aren't even that bad: https://investors.cloudera.com/news-and-events/news/press-release-details/2019/Cloudera-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Year-2019-Financial-Results/default.aspx
Who's still using Hadoop? At my last gig, we were phasing it out, left, right and centre.
The usual suspects with big on-prem estates; banks, telcos, government. Comparing MapR and the combined Cloudera/Hortonworks is a silly game. MapR are dying a death with a couple of hundred staff and just a handful of decent sized customers to their name. Cloudera sit at something like 3,000 employees and are as-good-as breaking even on a $700m run rate. That's big boy money.
Their real problem is their growth outlook, which is why the share price has taken a caning this year. So you're in all 10 of the top 10 banks, top 10 autos and top 10 telcos. Where next? Those sectors are all significantly reducing or eliminating on-premises spending for the foreseeable future. So the competition moves to the cloud, where ironically enough "Cloud"-era are several years behind the market. Hence the current annual growth prediction of almost zero, hence the current near-penny stock price.
The one thing Cloudera still has going for it is its ridiculous warchest - some half a billion dollars in the bank at the time of their last filing. That's not to be sniffed at, and it's more than enough to bring their stack kicking and screaming into the cloud.
"MapR was founded in 2009 to make money by commercialising the then on-trend open-source Hadoop tech."
This is a common misconception. MapR's products were primarily poorly-maintained clones of the then on-trend open-source tech. Quite why anyone would want to buy a less capable, proprietary clone of something they could download for free is something I never quite figured out. Nor, apparently, did MapR.
That’s also a common misconception. MapR-FS was an impressive distributed file system that in many ways blew HDFS out the water feature and performance wise. It provided a compatible HDFS API. MapR spent too long on the Hadoop track rather than playing to the strengths of their in-house developed tech.
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I bet there is a dark horse here that will acquire them at some extremely low price like $600m. Their platform goes way beyond Hadoop and is quite good. I know of several large banks using it. Could easily be turned around. Cloudera's market cap is 2-3x that even at these deflated levels.
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