Hortonworks Beat Estimates With 'Nice' Report, Shares Jump As Much As 15%

Shares of Hortonworks Inc (NASDAQ: HDP) rose as much as 15 percent in after hours trading Thursday.The company reported a second quarter adjusted loss of $0.80. Wall Street anticipated a slightly higher loss of $0.84. Sales arrived at $30.7 million, which was notably higher than the Street's estimate of $23.29 million.Hortonworks was up more than 12 percent as of 6:09 p.m. EST. The spike is being partially attributed to the firm's Q3 revenue estimate of $29 million to $31 million versus the Street estimate of $24.56 million.Sean Udall, CIO of Quantum Trading Strategies and author of The TechStrat Report, was particularly impressed by Hortonworks' results."They actually have a GAAP gross profit, which is a pretty big deal for a company this young post-IPO," Udall told Benzinga. "They have GAAP gross profit of $17.5 million…with these young companies, the GAAP loss and GAAP gross profit, some of these things can look a little funky. But deferred revenue is great, grew 104 percent over the prior period. Really nice report."Udall also praised Hortonworks' full year revenue estimate. "Total year forecast: $114 million to $117 million," he said. "I think that's like $20 million above! That's a nice report. What this basically is showing is that you definitely have a lot of traction in sort of the whole big data space. Really good stuff."Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry also has faith in Hortonworks' future. "I think they will continue to do well," he said. "Hortonworks is extremely strong."Chowdhry said that Hortonworks has a "very strong OEM business model." He said Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) provide "incremental business.""I think the reason why Hortonworks continues to do very well is because of the CEO, Rob Bearden," Chowdhry added. "He was the COO of JBoss. JBoss was acquired by Red Hat. Basically, this guy knows how to run the business extremely well and he has insights into the open source [space]."Bearden also served as the COO of SpringSource. Both firms were sold for more than $300 million each.Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.