Hortonworks went through an IPO last Friday, December 12, 2014. It’s initial price of $16 soared by 60% immediately after. Today the stock price is $24.70 with a market cap of $1.02B. Another billion dollar club member. They compete with Cloudera and MapR in packaging the open source Hadoop platform for customers. How do they make money when the basic Apache Hadoop is free? – by offering added services like training and consulting. They can also add auxiliary products (not open source) that customers must pay for. The interesting fact is that Hortonworks’s CEO had claimed a $100m revenue this year, but looks like he is way short of that – $33m during first nine months. The future is quite uncertain!