It would be easy to look at investors’ early enthusiasm for the newly public big data darling Hortonworks and conclude that the opportunity to cash in on the much-hyped Hadoop software platform has arrived.

The Palo Alto-based company became the first developer of a commercial version of the open-source data-storage technology to go public when it raised $100 million on Dec. 12. The company priced shares at $16, above the anticipated range. Shares popped 65 percent on the first day and settled at $26.38.

But it is still unclear which companies investors should bet on to capture the lion’s share of the profits in big data, and specifically Hadoop.