According to this Gartner report Hadoop faces challenges breaking into the enterprise. This assertion is not one I have experienced in working with customers all over Europe and Asia Pacific nor is it one that seems to be supported by the rapid growth of Hadoop ecosystem related organizations.

With Hortonworks recently declaring their Q2 results I thought now would be a good time to take stock of where Hadoop is in its adoption curve.  I have focused on the two vendors who seem to have the largest market share that have declared some sort of revenue and customer count numbers: Cloudera and Hortonworks. Before I start let me say I do not work for any of these organizations. I have done my best to ensure the accuracy of these numbers using public postings and assumptions but I am open to any corrections from the named vendors if they want to contact me.

Revenue:

Revenue reporting comparison is difficult given the sketchy information that is around for any vendor other than Hortonworks. Nonetheless the aim here is to try to make a reasonable guess at the total revenue for the vendors in question.

• Hortonworks: Reported revenue of $30.7 million for the quarter. The firm’s revenue for the quarter was up 153.7% on a year-over-year basis. Expectations are of Q3 revenue between $29 million and $31 million based on Hortonworks Guidance. Hortonworks has also projected revenue for the full year to be between $114 million and $117 million.
• Cloudera: Reported hitting just over $109M in revenue (for the Fiscal 2015 year which ended Jan 31) and 100 percent year-on-year revenue growth back in February. If we assume they are growing at the same rate as Hortonworks then they would shooting towards about $166 million by the end of the year. I have not seen any more recent result announcements to help me verify this.

MapR also reported 100% growth in bookings and billings during Q2 2015 compared to the same quarter in the prior year. I have been unable to find any revenue numbers for MapR hence why I could not include them or even take a guess at what their numbers might look like.

Cloudera and Hortonworks                                                                                  have now breached the $100 Million in revenue watermark in a very short space of time. Revenue projections for the end of the year, including my assumptions, suggest these two vendors will get to approximately $280M in revenue. The percentage increases being reported (and I expect Cloudera to do the same when they put out their next round of numbers) all are in three figures which certainly suggests a growing market.

Number of Customers:

Comparing customer counts across the Hadoop vendors is also pretty difficult. It seems that each vendor uses different metrics.

• Hortonworks: Reported 119 new subscription logos in Q2 on top of 105 in Q1. They had 332 subscription customers at the end of Q4 and so I that would put them at around at around 556 subscription customers at the end of Q2 2015.
• Cloudera: As of February 2015 Cloudera stated that the total number of enterprise customers was 525 (link). They also stated they added around 250 new logo customers in the 2015 fiscal year. It is probably not a stretch to assume they will do that again in their 2016 fiscal year. If they simply grow at the same rate as their 2015 fiscal year then it is likely they are now up near the 650-700 enterprise customers mark.

MapR stated they had 700 paying customers (Link) as of January this year. I cannot find anything specific to the first half of this year but you have to assume that has climbed given their revenue statement.

It would not be unreasonable to assume that we now have around 1200 enterprise customers using Cloudera or Hortonworks and if we take the MapR numbers that moves closer to 2000. Of course there are many more using these vendors in other ways and many organizations using other distributions as well.

Conferences:

Both Hortonworks (with their various Hadoop Summits) and Cloudera, in partnership with O’Reilly, via Strata and Hadoop world are attracting thousands of attendees. I was fortunate enough to be in Brussels, for Hadoop Summit, and London, for Strata and Hadoop World,  this year and was struck by the fact that both events were sold out, both had a very busy demo area featuring most of the major industry ISVs and both had training which was in high demand.

My View:

In my view there is a steady, but predictable, cadence of Hadoop adoption. With these three vendors accounting for about 2000 organizations with their enterprise deployments there is clearly more going on than a few advanced companies playing around. The Gartner report I referenced at the start of this update only had 284 responses, and so I do not believe it is capturing what is really happening in the market, even if the conclusions based on a limited sample are sound.  Others see this as a growth area which is why almost every ISV in the world is making sure they integrate and work with Hadoop. It is why Datameer was just able to attract $40 million in additional venture capital funding and Databricks just got an additional $44 Million.

Hadoop is here and it is expanding its footprint driven by a myriad of things. Organizations need to realize that at current rates not doing something with Hadoop might leave them in the minority moving forwards.

I am going to be putting out a few posts over the next weeks covering Hadoop in various industries so that you can get a feel for what might be happening in yours.

What do you think about the adoption of Hadoop?

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