Last week, Cloudera successfully completed an IPO, raising $259 million of equity capital, including the over-allotment option. Shares were priced at $15 per share and traded up to over $18 per share on the first day of trading, giving investors a 20%+ return.

Cloudera describes itself as a company that “empowers organizations to become data‑driven enterprises in the newly hyperconnected world.” Cloudera, founded in 2008, was the first commercial Hadoop player and is a Leader in Mike Gualtieri and Noel Yuhanna’s The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Hadoop Distributions, Q1 2016.

Last August, Forrester published its first Big Data Management Solutions Forecast, 2016 To 2021 (Global). In our forecast, we highlighted Hadoop as the fastest-growing sector, at a 32.9% CAGR over the 2016 to 2021 period. We estimate that firms will spend nearly $800 million on Hadoop and Hadoop-related services in 2017 and that this will grow to $2.3 billion by 2021.

In its S-1 filing, Cloudera reported revenues of $109 million, $166 million, and $261 million in the years ending January 31, 2015, 2016, and 2017, respectively. This represents 52% year-over-year growth in 2016, accelerating to 57% year-over-year growth in 2017. Cloudera’s customer base is primarily Global 8000 companies, accounting for 73% of revenues.

Cloudera’s Impala sets the bar high for other pure Hadoop SQL engines. For more information on SQL-For-Hadoop, see Brian Hopkins and Mike Gualtieri’s report SQL-For-Hadoop: 14 Capable Solutions Reviewed.

Forrester believes Hadoop is here to stay but faces challenges as enterprises increasingly want to do Hadoop in the cloud, as outlined in our report The Cloudy Future Of Hadoop. Cloudera is addressing this demand and bringing enterprise Hadoop to the cloud with partners AWS, CenturyLink, Google Cloud, and Microsoft. In our forecast, we expect cloud Hadoop deployments to be the fastest-growing piece of the Hadoop ecosystem.

Clients should also read The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Hadoop Cloud Solutions, Q2 2016 for more information on this area.