August 24, 2013

Hortonworks business notes

Hortonworks did a business-oriented round of outreach, talking with at least Derrick Harris and me. Notes  from my call — for which Rob Bearden didn’t bother showing up — include, in no particular order:

In Hortonworks’ view, Hadoop adopters typically start with a specific use case around a new type of data, such as clickstream, sensor, server log, geolocation, or social. 

The other 30% Hortonworks sees is efficiency-oriented — i.e., a cheaper way to store and/or process data.

One customer apparently estimates its fully burdened Hadoop costs at $900/terabyte/year.

Edit: I followed up on these efficiency-oriented use cases in a conversation with Cloudera.

And finally: One of my favorite things to ask is “When you win, why do win?” — at least when I think the vendor won’t just reiterate their core marketing messages. Hortonworks gave a great, threefold answer:

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Comments

5 Responses to “Hortonworks business notes”

  1. Cloudera Hadoop strategy and usage notes | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on August 25th, 2013 11:40 am

    […] stores, mainly RDBMS, analytic or otherwise. This sounds similar to Hortonworks’ views about efficiency-oriented offloading; batch work can be moved to Hadoop, saving costs and/or getting more mileage from costs that are […]

  2. Ely on August 26th, 2013 7:38 am
  3. Shaun Connolly on August 26th, 2013 11:56 am

    Thanks for the writeup Curt. A few clarifications:

    – the briefing was a follow up from our prior tech-focused briefing, so I did not invite Rob; I didn’t realize you’d be disappointed 😉

    – re: Intel rumors; talk doesn’t always equate to reality; could it be that your sources got their wires crossed with the fact that our $50M round was happening at that same time?

    – re: Financial Services sector; competitive means competitive. Which should not be surprising since Fin Srv tends to be early adopters and tries out solutions from multiple vendors.

    – Rob negotiated the spinoff with Yahoo! so he’s allowed to have a reason for starting the company, no?

    – To clarify the 70/30 points, of which there are multiple:
    — Our bookings are comprised of 70% subscription and 30% training & consulting
    — 70% of the deployments are focused on targeted analytic apps while the other 30% is data lake, elt offload, or equiv.
    — 70% of the targeted analytic apps customers want/expect to grow into a data lake or equiv; the others will just stay app-driven

    Hope that clarifies.

  4. Curt Monash on August 26th, 2013 1:48 pm

    – the briefing was a follow up from our prior tech-focused briefing, so I did not invite Rob; I didn’t realize you’d be disappointed 😉

    It was pitched as having Rob involved. But no worries — you did a great job. 🙂

    – re: Intel rumors; talk doesn’t always equate to reality; could it be that your sources got their wires crossed with the fact that our $50M round was happening at that same time?

    No, it really couldn’t.

    – re: Financial Services sector; competitive means competitive. Which should not be surprising since Fin Srv tends to be early adopters and tries out solutions from multiple vendors.

    I’m sure if I surveyed the vendors as to their respective competitive win rates in the sector, they’d add up to 2-300%, as such figures always do. 😉

    – Rob negotiated the spinoff with Yahoo! so he’s allowed to have a reason for starting the company, no?

    Makes sense. Thanks.

    – To clarify the 70/30 points, of which there are multiple:
    – Our bookings are comprised of 70% subscription and 30% training & consulting
    – 70% of the deployments are focused on targeted analytic apps while the other 30% is data lake, elt offload, or equiv.
    – 70% of the targeted analytic apps customers want/expect to grow into a data lake or equiv; the others will just stay app-driven

    What a remarkable coincidence that all those figures are 70%! 😉

  5. Notes on the Hortonworks IPO S-1 filing | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on December 7th, 2014 8:53 am

    […] Hortonworks business notes, not all of which turn out in retrospect to have been wholly accurate (August, 2013) […]

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