The race to to the stock exchange in the Hadoop ecosystem is entering its second phase. A month and a half after Hortonworks Inc. became the first distributor of the data crunching framework to begin trading on the NASDAQ, the founder and CEO of one of its biggest rivals has revealed plans to follow suit.

John Schroeder of MapR Technologies Inc. (right) told Fortune in an interview published on Wednesday that he intends to take the firm public “sometime” in late 2015. That falls within the two-year time frame he laid out in November of 2013 following the appointment of Dan Atler as the company’s first chief financial officer.

At the time, the hire was a landmark in MapR’s evolution from an emerging startup to a major Hadoop player, but the creation of the CFO position drew less attention than the person filling it. Atler spent more than 20 years at publicly-trading companies, during which he personally led two to their stock market debuts.

The appointment followed closely behind MapR expanding its board of directors with the addition Mike Lehman, another veteran financial executive who kept the books for Sun Microsystems Inc., Palo Alto Networks, Inc. and other big technology firms. MapR has clearly had its sights on an IPO for some time, but Schroeder and the rest of the management team have been careful not to rush the process – and for good reason.

Hitting the stock exchange too soon can severely limit a startup’s strategic runaway and hurt long-term momentum. MapR has raised far less venture capital than competitors Hortonworks, Inc and Cloudera, Inc., instead choosing a growth strategy that earned it more than 700 paying customers and provides management with a solid foundation for a public offering.

Now that the second shoe has dropped, the big question remaining is how long until Cloudera joins the race? The company had less than 400 customers as of March of last year, but it has raised $900 million from Intel and a number of other investors in the interim. That gives it the luxury of putting off an IPO for quite a while, should it so choose. However, Cloudera may attempt to capitalize on Wall Street’s appetite for Hadoop before the competition takes all the spotlight, which could set the market up for a busy 2015.