American open source specialist Cloudera, which built a business around Apache Hadoop big data framework, is reportedly planning to become a public company.

Sources told Bloomberg that Cloudera has already filed an initial public offering request with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Philippines stock market board
Stock market board – Wikimedia Commons/KatrinaTuliao

Going public

Company representatives are allegedly in discussions with J.P Morgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Bank of America. Although it has yet to be officially confirmed, the company may be seeking a valuation of $4.1 billion.

Cloudera offers software based on Apache Hadoop, a popular storage and processing framework used in analytics, along with a number of support and training services. The company was founded in 2008 by engineers Christophe Bisciglia (Google), Amr Awadallah (Yahoo) and Jeff Hammerbacker (Facebook) and Oracle executive Mike Olson.

In 2016, the company was ranked 5th on Forbes’ cloud 100 list.

2016 was widely considered to be a dreadful year for tech IPOs - there were just 21 US tech companies entering public markets, and they only managed to raise $3 billion - less than in both 2014 and 2015.

This year has got off to a much more promising start: it barely needs mentioning that the Snapchat parent company Snap went public earlier this month; other expected tech IPOs include MuleSoft, Alteryx, Carbon Black, AppNexus and ForeScout.