Speculation is mounting that Databricks Inc., the company behind the Apache Spark cluster computing framework, might be headed for an IPO or perhaps even more after it announced a change of leadership this week.

The company quietly appointed Ali Ghodsi, its vice president of engineering and product, as its new chief executive officer on Monday. The previous CEO and co-founder Ion Stoica stays with the company though, becoming its new executive chairman. Meanwhile, Patrick Wendell has been tasked with filling Ghodsi’s shoes, while Ron Gabrisko, who previously worked with Axway Inc., has been hired as Databrick’s new senior vice president of worldwide sales.

Somewhat interestingly the changes were only reported for the first time yesterday by ZDNet’s Andrew Brust, who speculates the reorganization may be a prelude to Databricks filing for an IPO, or perhaps even finding a buyer.

According to Brust, although Spark itself has been hugely successful, the fortunes of Databricks itself are somewhat less clear.

Of course Databricks insisted that things were going well for the company. “Since GA 6 months ago, we are continuing with accelerated growth (over 200 paying customers),” said Databricks’ VP of Marketing Kavitha Mariappan in an email to ZDNet. Mariappan added that the company isn’t looking to change its focus regarding Spark’s development or its recently released cloud platform.

Brust offers several reasons as to why Databricks may have decided it was time for a change, including the fact that it just wants to sustain its growth, or that it may have found it challenging to continue Spark’s development and push its cloud platform under the current structure.

“[the company] is growing in terms of breadth of customers, use cases, industries, scale of deployment, company size…, and [they] feel that this will give [them] the optimal organizational structure to execute and scale going forward,” Mariappan added.

Alternatively Brust suggests that the new changes, particularly the appointment of Gabrisko, may have been the result of investor’s demands.

“Ron has 15 years of enterprise software high velocity (SaaS) sales experience in hyper growth companies, and has built and led sales teams to success – both IPO and acquisition” Mariappan said.