Hadoop-flinger MapR: Yes to IPO, profits 'soon after' • The Register

MapR Technologies is going for IPO – just not yet, the company’s chief executive Matt Mills has told The Reg.

Mills, the Hadoop flinger’s CEO since September 2016 and the company’s former president and chief operating officer, wouldn’t set a public date but said floatation is on the cards. Mills is an Oracle veteran of 20 years having served as vice president and general manager and who joined MapR in October 2015.

“I want to go to IPO but I want to be respectful of the process,” Mills claimed.

Mills reckoned he wanted to “get a couple of quarters under the belt” and for a relatively new management team to gain more experience.

MapR is talking to a “number” of bankers, including Goldman Sachs, he said.

Mills denied either he or the firm were coming under pressure to IPO.

Founded in 2009, MapR has taken on $194m in five rounds of VC funding. IPO is typically one of two outcomes VC backers of firms wish to see – the other being acquisition.

“With other people’s money, there’s always pressure,” Mills said, but denied this was anything unusual or had pushed his decision or timing.

Two of MapR’s best known rivals have floated – Hortonworks, first, in 2014 and Cloudera recently in April.

The market for these self-styled big-data firms is rich with hype but profitable returns haven’t proved as easy as their founders or backers might have wished.

For all the talk of data being the mainstay of the fourth industrial revolution, relatively few customers’ Hadoop projects are making it into production.

Sales are taking longer than anticipated for vendors, which continue to make losses despite growing sales. HortonWorks unsettled Wall St’s big data believers in January when it announced a planned secondary IPO to raise $100m.

Gartner research vice president Merv Adrian has pegged the number at 15 per cent^[1].

Mills reckoned he was “seeing the same thing” among MapR customers but attributed this to the fact that many start as skunkworks.

“The idea that the majority of the market doesn’t make it into production is accurate," he said.

Mills reckoned MapR’s sales are growing, with an average deal size greater than $100,000, but he wouldn’t comment on costs or losses.

He reckoned MapR had become more discerning on customers – targeting “larger” deals, unlike in its early days. “We used to sell to anybody who answered the phone, now we target the global 2,000 – we go after people who target data,” he said.

He claimed the firm had customers in market research, online advertising and financial services.

“We are trading in the direction of what you’d expect from a software company thinking about a public offering – we are in that neighbourhood,” he said.

Mills reckoned MapR would hit profit soon after an IPO. “We won’t be burning cash. We will be a stable company very shortly after we are a public company.”

The company’s current focus is on sales, marketing and consulting; also he claimed growth opportunities in China and the need to develop a MapR partner ecosystem, something the company has been slow to work on. ®

References

1. ^{^} 15 per cent (twitter.com)

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