As if we needed any more evidence of how hot Hadoop is right now, Hortonworks Inc., the second-largest Hadoop distributor according to Wikibon, has filed for an initial public offering to take place this year or next.

News of its impending IPO was first reported in Forbes, which provided a number of details about the state of the company’s finances. According to the filing, Hortonworks had revenues of just $11 million in 2013, while its losses amounted to $36.6 million. Things have improved a notch in 2014, with revenues of $33.3 million compared to losses of $86.7 million.

What wasn’t said is how many shares Hortonworks wants to sell, nor the price it’s asking for. However, Forbes says the estimated value of the firm’s IPO will be around the $100 million mark, subject to change.

Despite its losses, investors have plenty of reason to be confident in Hortonworks. The company is one of the “big 3” Hadoop vendors, alongside Cloudera Inc., and MapR Technologies Inc., having been founded in 2011 with $23 million seed funding from partners including Yahoo! Inc. and Benchmark Capital. Since then it’s pulled in another $50 million from Yahoo! and others in a second funding round, before bagging a further $50 million from Hewlett-Packard Co. last July.

Even so, its funding trails significantly behind that of rival Cloudera, which was lavished to the tune of $740 million by Intel Corp. earlier this year. As for MapR, it recently secured $110 million from a funding round led by Google Capital.

The three companies are all betting that Hadoop will soon become essential to the enterprise as the Big Data bandwagon picks up steam, and it seems investors are already convinced.

As for when the IPO will happen, most reports say sometime next year, though Dan Primack at Fortune reckons Hortonworks will probably go public before the end of the year. It’s anyone’s guess as to how it will perform, but whether it’s a hit or a miss it’s likely to cause some ructions in the Hadoop space. If the IPO proves to be a hit, Cloudera and MapR will need to do some careful planning to ensure Hortonworks doesn’t accumulate too much capital or market share – on the other hand, if it all goes tits up for Hortonworks, the pair will be forced to give their own IPO plans a serious rethink.

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