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Comment by hendzen | Hacker News Reader

Both Hortonworks & Cloudera are the most similar recent IPOs. Hortonworks is below the offering price, Cloudera has been basically flat. And this is in the context of an insane bull market for tech stocks and the market in general.

So we will see how this turns out. It's been a couple years since they last raised funding so its possible they didn't really have another choice. Chances are if the numbers on the S-1 were truly great they wouldn't have done it confidentially.

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Do you have any info that companies that don't have great numbers tend to file S-1's confidentially compared to companies with great numbers?

In my experience, companies that can file confidentially will, regardless of their numbers (and I think all companies now have the option to do so).

Nutanix, Twilio are two recent ones (IPO'd in 2016). They both were great performers last year.

I don't have the time to dig up all the data and do a comparison of the correlation between returns on companies that used the confidentiality exception vs. companies that didn't, but it would certainly be an interesting analysis.

Are you sure Twilio or Nutanix didn't file confidentially before its S-1 was flipped public? I'm actually not sure if there's a way to tell, other than a leak.

It's worse than that, cloudera went public at a valuation below the price set during their last round of fundraising. Also, people are bullish on tech companies that are consumer tech related or are in the enterprise space serving industries not relating to tech directly. P/E ratios for companies like oracle, ibm and cisco aren't that high.

Not true. Oracle's P/E is 22, Apple's is 18, MSFT's is 27. Oracle is doing just fine.

MongoDBs market is not exactly the same as the Hadoop vendors' although there are overlaps. One of the biggest driver of adoption for mongo are projects that start out as small, rapidly done prototypes and then grow large. It's really easy to start with and scale to decent amounts of data with mongodb.

It's not the same exact market but its essentially the same business model - build a community around an open source system and then upsell enterprise customers on support, consulting & services.

Big difference is in fact apparent right there in your original post: There are two (actually three plus more) vendors backing hadoop, an amorphous community based around an Apache foundation project that no commercial entity controls. This means the Hadoop ecosystem, while generating plenty of value, is not one that can be captured by a particular firm. Plus, the operational database market is ultimately far larger than the Hadoop ecosystem, and so taking a reasonable bite out of it means a materially different market. Finally, it's not just about control of the market, but the software license. Hadoop vendors have little defense of an Apache licensed stack, and face massive threats from new cloud offerings.

Good points. For what its worth there are other successful MongoDB hosting providers - mLab (originally MongoLab), compose (originally MongoHQ), and ObjectRocket - so they (MongoDB, Inc) don't have complete control over the ecosystem, despite the AGPL licensing. Well, they do have the market for support cornered, but long term the margins on that are much lower than DBaaS.

I think a larger issue for MongoDB (& Hortonworks/Cloudera/MapR) is Amazon/GCS/Microsoft hosted services that obsolete them for many use cases. MS already has Azure DocumentDB that supports ACID transactions and has a MongoDB compatible API.

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