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Hortonworks Inc. filed to sell shares in an initial public offering, betting on growth in demand for products and services based on Hadoop free software for storing, analyzing and managing large amounts of data.

The Palo Alto, California-based company filed for a $100 million IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today. The figure is a placeholder used to calculate fees and may change. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Credit Suisse Group AG and RBC Capital Markets LLC will manage the sale.

Hortonworks, founded in 2011, is the first company focused on Hadoop, a free suite of software that lets people manage reams of data cheaply and efficiently, to file for an IPO. Its timing puts it ahead of older competitors Cloudera Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc. The global market for Hadoop products, software and services is projected to reach $50.2 billion in 2020, up from $1.5 billion in 2012, according to a March report from Allied Market Research.

Hortonworks sales in the year that ended in April 2013 rose to $11 million from $1.6 million a year earlier, while its net loss widened to $36.6 million from $11.5 million, according to the filing. For the 12 months that ended in September 2014, revenue was $41.5 million and the loss was $101.5 million.

Our mission is to establish Hadoop as the foundational technology of the modern enterprise data architecture, the company wrote.

Chief Executive Officer Rob Bearden has experience minting sales out of open-source software, having previously sold JBoss Inc. to Red Hat Inc. in 2006 and SpringSource Inc. to VMware Inc. in 2009. He has also worked at Oracle Corp.

Hortonworks was spun out of Web portal Yahoo! Inc., where Hadoop was developed. It employs more than 500 people and has taken in $225 million of funding, including a $100 million round in March led by BlackRock Inc. Its rivals are equally well funded: Cloudera, founded in 2008, gained $740 million in funding from Intel Corp. at a valuation of $4.1 billion in March. MapR, started in 2009, in June closed a $110 million round of financing led by Google Capital.

If they have a successful public offering, that means we will continue to have a very successful business, Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said in an interview. I dont think this is a race about who is the first public company.

Hadoop is named after a yellow stuffed toy elephant that belonged to the son of Doug Cutting, the creator of the software. Cutting now works at Cloudera.

Hortonworks makes money by selling support and professional services for Hadoop. All of the companys software is available for free, while Cloudera and MapR develop proprietary programs that customers can pay for along with free Hadoop software.

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Hortonworks Files to Sell Shares in IPO of Hadoop Company