Demand for Hadoop in the enterprise is not merely growing fast but at an accelerating rate as well if the latest earnings report from Hortonworks Inc. is anything to go by. The distributor claims to have generated $37 million in revenue during the fourth quarter, which constitutes a massive 196 percent jump from last year. In comparison, sales increased only 159 percent in the previous three-month period ended June 2015 and 154 percent before that.

Hortonworks’ operating loss, meanwhile, has nearly halved an annual basis to $50.6 million. The numbers potentially put the firm on track to come out of the red in the foreseeable future, although it’s likely to continue prioritizing growth over profitability while the current momentum lasts. Management has a sizable war chest at its disposal that stands at roughly $200 million, about half of which came from a secondary stock offering last month.

But while comfortable, Hortonworks’ runway is not without obstacles. The most strategic threat to the company’s plans is arguably Apache Spark, which started out as an alternative to the default MapReduce processing engine in Hadoop and has since become a force in its own right. A landmark survey published in the fourth quarter of last year found that more organizations are now deploying the framework on a standalone basis than as part of a regular distribution. The trend can be credited in part to the fact that it’s able to substitute much of the value-added functionality that vendors are offering, like support for machine learning workloads, with native extensions.

The appeal of Spark is set to expand even further in the wake of IBM Corp.’s pledge to commit a billion dollars and 3,500 engineers to strengthening its data crunching capabilities. For Hortonworks, the growing popularity of the framework comes in addition to the intensifying competition from its fellow Hadoop distributors, which are also working hard to increase their revenue. MapR Technologies Inc., for instance, recently revealed to have increased sales by more than 150 percent in the fourth quarter.

The fact Hortonworks’ revenue grew considerably more in the same period should help relieve the concerns of the analysts that downgraded their rating on its stock following the secondary offering last month. The earnings report certainly had the desired effect on the company’s investors,  which have pushed its share price up more than 11 percent since the news crossed the wire.

Image via Ramy Majouji/Wikimedia