It appears that MapR is laying down the groundwork for an initial public offering. The San Jose, Calif-based Hadoop distributor named Dan Alter as its first chief financial officer on Wednesday, signaling that it wants in on the Big Data gold rush sweeping through Wall Street.

Alter brings much-needed financial experience to the company, having previously served as the CFO of Ikanos Communications and Silicon Image. He took both semiconductor makers public, according to Reuters, which quoted MapR co-founder and CEO John Schroeder as saying that an IPO is “something we would entertain over the next couple of years.” Schroeder first hinted that his firm was headed toward a stock market debut in April, when former Sun Microsystems CFO Michael Lehman came on board as an independent director.

“We have experienced major customer acquisition and a strong worldwide presence in only two years since launching the company and the time is right to bring on a senior statesman like Mike with unrivaled success in financial strategies and operations to guide MapR through the next phase of corporate expansion,” the CEO commented on the appointment.

An IPO would provide the firm with extra capital to leap ahead of rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks, which are riding the open source wave into the traditional enterprise. MapR in contrast offers a largely proprietary distribution of Hadoop that replaces HDFS with a homegrown file system called MapR-FS.

M7, the latest release of MapR’s distro, integrates the system with the HBase database layer in Hadoop to accelerate queries and deliver four to ten times greater throughput. The company further claims that the software delivers consistent sub-20ms latency for “various workloads,” including traditional enterprise apps originally developed with relational backends in mind.