Hortonworks shares plunge 22% after secondary IPO news

The shares of the Hadoop open-source software distributor Hortonworks have plunged 22 per cent following the company's announcement that it had filed for a secondary IPO. Hortonworks is seeking to raise a proposed maximum $100m through the sale of common stock shares, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange …

[Erik4872]

Most people aren't ready for Big Data yet

Outside of the Internet startup bubble, Big Data is still a pretty hard sell. Even businesses with high transaction volumes have a pretty good handle on analytics, and frankly have been sold management consultant snake oil for ages. In startup-land, the draw is the fact that the only way some of them can make money is mining and monetizing customer interaction data.

I'm not saying big data is useless, but the breathless consultant hype has to die down and people need to understand what it really offers them.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a consultant

(though not of the snake oil type I like to think) we are actively trying to not sell Hadoop, it's the organisations wanting to buy it.

We know full well that it's not likely to give them what they want - but someone in the client organisation wants to have it on their CV.

[MT Field]

How can you have a second Initial Public Offering?

[Alistair]

Added to my CV.

There is a place for it in businesses that have other analytic tools in place, as an adjunct or accessory to standard business analysis tools. The issue is finding folks in the business that know which questions they want answered. Most of our issue has been moving data from historical environments to the new environment. Once its *there* the old queries can be satisfied quite well, usually with *much* faster response times (in our case - the old environment included a data migration to tape component, and getting it *back* was terrible) - and we're slowly getting new queries into the mix. We've added a far faster set of data retirement, recovery tools, which also massively improves performance.

We've *new* data streams coming into the environment that will be chewed on by the data scientists for a while and eventually turned into pretty pictures for management and advertising. Not sure how this will work for the business itself, but I'm sure they'll manage to sell it on to other groups as valuable information.

Right now, biggest issue is getting old and new data mining tools to play nice together so that it can all be presented in one interface/set of reports/graphing tools.

[CheesyTheClown]

Hadoop still relevant?

Are there any Hadoop scale problems that can't be solved cheaper and easier these days?

[happy but not clappy]

Bleeding at the edge

I'm currently reviewing "big data" tech, and it isn't pretty. Most of it (with the honourable exception of Cassandra) just doesn't scale well. And none of them cover the standard use-cases well without significant complexity, though they are trying. Look at the mess that is the Apache ecosystem. How many products?

Any medium size business that throws money at this is probably going to lose large chunks of it, same as they did in the nineties with "data warehouses". Still, this is SNAFU, so not so surprising.

FYI, for extra CV points, add "data lakes". Oh yes. I've got three out back...

[Anonymous Coward]

TeraData are going to buy HortonWorks