Drexel Is 'Running With The Elephants,' Starts Coverage On Hortonworks At Buy

• Shares of Hortonworks Inc (NASDAQ: HDP) have been volatile in 2015 and are down 27 percent year-to-date.
• Drexel Hamilton’s Brian J. White initiated coverage of the company with a Buy rating and price target of $44.
• The current stock valuation offers an attractive entry point, White believes.

Analyst Brian White mentioned that Hortonworks is one of the few pure plays for investors in the Big Data movement. He added that the near 28 percent year-to-date decline in the company’s shares presents an attractive entry point in this Hadoop vendor.

Hortonworks is a leading player in the enterprise-grade Hadoop market in terms of revenues and is an employer of the largest number of Apache Hadoop committers.

Interactions with customers, IT companies, Hadoop-related vendors and other Big Data players indicate the growing momentum around Hadoop, White mentioned. According to Allied Market Research estimates, Hadoop is expected to grow at a CAGR of 58 percent between 2013 and 2020.

White believes that Hortonworks is well positioned to capture new growth opportunities as organizations build out their Big Data platforms. “In our view, Hortonworks provides investors with exposure to four key trends in the technology world: Hadoop, Big Data, the Internet of Things and the broader movement around open source software,” the analyst added.

White compared the Big Data movement to Cloud computing, and stated that the former is in a position where Cloud computing was in 2008-2009.