Investors Are Eating Up The IPOs Of Two Hot Tech Companies

Hortonworks

The hype cycle for "big data" peaked about a year ago, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the IPOs of two companies in the field this morning.

Both Hortonworks and New Relic are up about 40% from their IPO prices. The companies both help businesses make sense of the flood of data that businesses can gather these days.

The idea of gathering and analyzing data is nothing new - similar products known as "business intelligence" or "data analytics" have been around for decades.

But new technologies have sprung up in the last few years that allow businesses to collect more of that data, and store and analyze it much more cheaply and quickly. These technologies have created new companies that threaten to take business away from older tech companies like Oracle and IBM.

Hortonworks is one of the best known companies in this space. It distributes and supports an open source technology called Hadoop, which was first invented at Yahoo to store and arrange huge amounts of web data on low-cost hardware. It's used by everybody from web companies such as eBay to health care companies like UC Irvine.

Hortonworks priced at $16 and jumped almost 50% to over $24. It's up about 40% as of right now.

New Relic has a much more specific function: it lets companies monitor the stream of information coming from user actions on web applications to make sure those apps are performing up to par. Customers are mostly companies with big online sites like Microsoft, Adobe, and Fox.

New Relic priced at $23 and jumped to more than $33. It's up about 45%.

Both companies raised about $100 million and are valued around $1 billion now.

They follow the successful debut of Lending Club yesterday, which raised close to $1 billion and was the biggest U.S. tech IPO of the year. It offers an online network for individuals to get personal loans more easily.

These businesses do not have the obvious consumer appeal of companies like Groupon or Facebook, but they have real paying customers and they're growing fast. Sometimes boring is good business.