Jack Norris – MapR CMO – In theCUBE During Hadoop Summit 2014

In a February research report that analyzed Hadoop distributions from nine vendors, Forrester Research concluded that MapR Technologies, Inc. “has a leading solution; it must now make more noise in the market and accelerate its partnerships and distribution channels.” This week, MapR aims to do just that.

The company is announcing today that its MapR-DB NoSQL key-value database will be bundled into the free edition of its MapR Community Edition Hadoop distribution and licensed for unlimited use.

MapR is betting that the move will address its low visibility by getting the database into the hands of more users and developers who can exploit its strengths in real time applications. Forrester again ranked MapR the technology leader in its most recent Wave survey of Big Data Hadoop products. In addition to making MapR-DB free to use, the company has also launched an App Gallery to showcase third-party developers and is stepping up its developer support programs, according to Chief Marketing Officer Jack Norris.

While the Community Edition can technically be used for very large applications, MapR is betting that it can continue to charge enterprise customers for features like disaster recovery, service level guarantees and 24-hour support. Norris dismissed questions about cannibalization, calling the bundling strategy “a positive move for the market.”

Real-Time Strength

MapR targets applications that involve processing large amounts of data quickly for functions like fraud detection, stock trading, customer experience management and process control. The company’s strategy is to plug gaps in the Hadoop ecosystem with proprietary extensions while remaining faithful to the open source nature of the core distribution. For example, MapR DB supports the application programming interface for Hadoop HBase and includes that native database in its distribution.

However, its preference for its own technology is clear. “If you look at Hadoop distros, our Community Edition is far more powerful than others on the market,” Norris said.

MapR claims to have more than 500 paying customers, mostly in the financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and telecommunications industries. It has raised $174 million keeping pace with its leading independent competitors, Cloudera, Inc. and Hortonworks, Inc. .

Despite investors’ love affair with all things Hadoop, CIOs remain wary. A Barclays survey released last month found that 72 out of 100 CIOs who were polled said that it was still too early to say whether Hadoop would become an important technology in their organization.

In an effort to battle that uncertainty, MapR also today released the results of a study by a third-party research firm that found that a majority of its customers saw payback in less than 12 months and a greater than five-fold return on their investment. Furthermore, the research across “more than 50 companies” who use MapR found that nearly two-thirds of customers who had experience with other Hadoop distributions saw costs decrease with MapR while 35% reported increased revenue.

The survey didn’t ask for specifics on how return was defined, but Norris said cost reduction, revenue enhancement and risk mitigation were top three metrics. He added that 80% of MaprR customers expand their cluster within the first 12 months. “It’s very different from a data warehouse, where you spend six months in planning,” he said. Hadoop is so quick to get up and running that “many customers deploy first and then determine the use case in parallel.”