Hortonworks falls short with $12.7M in revenue in its first earnings report

Updated at 4:38 p.m. Pacific to remove references to Cloudera’s customer base. A Cloudera spokeswoman says Cloudera and Hortonworks count customers differently.

Hortonworks, a company selling a distribution of the open-source Hadoop big-data software, announced $12.7 million in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2014, falling short of analysts’ estimates of $13.42 million in its first-ever earnings release today.

The company’s non-GAAP net loss for the quarter came in at $2.19 per share. That doesn’t compare well with the $2.04 per share net loss that analysts were expecting.

On a GAAP basis, the company registered a $90.6 million loss for the quarter.

But hey, billings were up 148 percent year over year, as the company called out in a statement.

And the company is touting a total of 332 subscription customers, with 99 new customers in the fourth quarter, a Hortonworks spokesman told VentureBeat after the earnings release came out.

Still, the news doesn’t look all that good for Hortonworks, which competes with Cloudera and MapR, both of which are believed to be preparing to go public.

Hortonworks debuted on the Nasdaq on Dec. 12, enjoying a 50 percent stock share price increase out of the gate that morning in New York after raising $100 million in its initial public offering. In December the stock first started trading at $24. Today the stock, trading under the symbol HDP, closed at $24.61.

Today’s results from Hortonworks follow last week’s strong first-ever earnings report from software analytics company New Relic. New Relic and Hortonworks, incidentally, went public on the same day.

Last week Hortonworks picked up a significant partnership with Pivotal, which moved to open-source key Hadoop technologies.