Big data software vendor MapR Technologies Inc. is putting a 20-year Oracle veteran in charge of its day-to-day operations as it enters the home stretch of what it hopes will be the road to an initial public offering (IPO).

The company promoted Matt Mills (above right) to chief executive and named co-founder and previous CEO John Schroeder (left) executive chairman. Mills joined the company last October from Oracle, where he was a senior vice president and head of an 8,000-person team supporting a multi-billion dollar business. Schroeder said he’ll continue to remain involved full-time with the company, working on strategy, investor relations and industry and customer relationships.

MapR took pains to position the transition as an evolutionary step as it crosses the 500-employee mark and continues to double revenues annually. The company said Mills and Schroeder have “strong complementary skill sets, mutual respect for each other, and have already proven to be a successful leadership team.” It made both executives available for joint interviews with press and analysts.

Don’t fix it

Mills emphasized that nothing is broken at MapR and that his focus is on raising visibility and accelerating growth. “I think we’ve had a bit of an awareness issue,” he said in an interview, “so we’ve added marketing resources to get us more at-bats. We want to grow the top line as fast as we can, but we also want to build a great support and professional services organization.”

MapR is clearly eager not to be associated too closely with open-source competitor Hortonworks Inc., which missed earnings estimates and parted ways with its president a month ago. Skepticism has been growing about the viability of open source-based businesses that rely upon support and packaging for their revenue.

“We always get lumped into that [Hadoop] distro bucket and we don’t think we really belong there,” Mills said. “We’re a software company. Ninety percent of our revenue comes from our own intellectual property.”

Schroeder sounded a note of fiscal responsibility, adding, “I don’t think we’ve ever burned in a year what Hortonworks has burned in a single quarter. The open-source-only model really has only worked for Red Hat and will probably never work again.”

MapR’s strategy is to build a platform that encompasses both open-source components from the Hadoop ecosystem and proprietary extensions that bring together NoSQL, primary storage, publish-and-subscribe messaging and real-time processing in what it calls a converged platform. “We never set out to be an open-source-only company,” Schroeder said.

Mills said that strategy plays well to enterprises, which no longer consider big data to be a laboratory experiment. “As big data workloads make their way into production environments, a lot of the things companies have been looking for in the online transaction processing world they’re now looking for in the big data environment,” Mills said. “Mirroring and global namespaces are no longer a nice-to-have. That plays strongly into our hands.”

Asked what Oracle strengths he would most like to see MapR emulate, Mills said “operational excellence. Oracle runs a very tight ship, with a very high level of focus around its customers and critical success factors. I’m trying to bring those things to bear here.” And what about Oracle would he hope to avoid? “Oracle guys have been saddled as a tough customer,” he said. “We want to be a customer-centric operation.”

Schroeder, who co-founded MapR in 2009 and guided it to $194 million in venture capital investment, including a $50 million round last month, said the company has no hard timetable for an IPO and is willing to wait until it can make an offering a quality event. With a 99 percent subscriber renewal rate and 145 percent annual growth in business with existing customers, he said, the stage is being set for a company that can go the distance.

“We want to be the highest-quality IPO for a tech company in terms of cash flow, growth and stability,” he said. “We meet with the investment banks on a regular basis. We’re getting a lot of good feedback and I think that’s going to continue through at least the middle of next year. We want to be at the right scale so we can give conservative guidance and be cash-flow-positive.”

With MapR on track to break even on a cash-flow basis by the middle of next year, a mid-2017 target would seem about right.

Image courtesy MapR