The entire Hadoop industry has been anticipating yesterday’s first-ever quarterly earnings report from Hortonworks, Inc., but the results were neither a home run nor a strikeout. The company that grabbed the stock symbol HDP said its losses continue to grow, but it painted a rosy picture of the future. The stock market chose to look on the bright side sending shares sliding less than three percent during the next trading day.

Hortonworks reported $12.7 million in revenues for Q4 of 2014, which was short of analysts’ $13.42 million expectations. Its non-GAAP net loss of $2.19 per share also undershot the $2.04 per share net loss the market was hoping for. The firm also registered a $90.6 million operating loss on a GAAP basis for the quarter.

One might think it’s an awful lot of cash for a startup to be bleeding, but Hortonworks insists that revenues are not the most important thing to look at when it comes to assessing the health of its business. When the company first filed its S-1 pre-IPO statement last November, it said analysts should look at its total billings as a more accurate representation of the state of its business, because it doesn’t always get paid immediately for the services it provides.

A look at Hortonworks’ billings tells quite a different story, as GigaOM notes. The company reported $31.9 million in total fourth quarter billings, which is a 148 percent increase year-on-year. Meanwhile, billings for the full fiscal year came in at $87.1 million, which represents a 134 percent rise compared to the year before.

If one looks at those figures, suddenly Hortonworks compares favorably to its main rival Cloudera, Inc., which said it took in $100 million in 2014, a figure they can’t be verified because Cloudera is a private company.

Also promising for Hortonworks was the news that it now has a total of 332 subscription customers, with 99 new customers added in the fourth quarter, according to VentureBeat.

“It’s not surprising to me that Hortonworks is spending at the level it is. As I pointed out at #BigDataSV, the Hadoop marketplace is extremely competitive, and building a sustainable business requires significant investment to build out distribution channels and to fight the marketing machines of the mega-vendors in this space,” said Jeff Kelly, Principal Analyst at Wikibon, who closely covers the Hadoop market. “What’s encouraging is the customer traction Hortonworks is gaining. The company is up over 330 subscription customers – that’s unique companies – and they are growing customer count by nearly 250% year-over-year.”

All in all it’s a mixed bag for Hortonworks, with the results highlighting what market watchers have known for some time already – that the Hadoop market remains a small but growing one, with paying customers still very thin on the ground.