If you go back about a decade, Hadoop was hot and getting hotter. It was a platform for processing big data, just as big data was emerging from the domain of a few web-scale companies to one where every company was suddenly concerned about processing huge amounts of data. The future was bright, an open source project with a bunch of startups emerging to fulfill that big data promise in the enterprise.

Three companies in particular emerged out of that early scrum — Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR — and between them raised more than $1.5 billion. The lion’s share of that went to Cloudera in one massive chunk when Intel Capital invested a whopping $740 million in the company. But times have changed.

Falling hard

Just yesterday, HPE bought the assets of MapR, a company that had raised $280 million. The deal was pegged at under $50 million, according to multiple reports. That’s not what you call a healthy return on investment.