MapR announced this week that it’s bolstering its oversees presence with a new branch in Stockholm, Sweden. The office will be led by senior executive Patrik Svanström, who will spearhead the Hadoop distributor’s expansion into the booming Nordic market.

Svanström joins MapR from Hewlett Packard’s General Western Europe division, where he was responsible for 120 employees and a $500 million revenue stream spanning eight countries. Prior to his stint at HP, the executive served as the managing director for EMC in Sweden and held senior roles at Oracle, Infor and Xerox.

“Hadoop is one of the most exciting developments in technology for over a decade,” said Svanström. “The chance to work with a market leader to build a new team and grow the business at a stage when the technology is starting to head into a wider adoption phase
is an exciting prospect. I look forward to bringing my expertise to help deliver real benefits for our clients and partners.”

Syanstrom will be working with Ulf Andreasson, MapR’s new systems architect for the Nordic region. Andreasson brings over 20 years of experience to the company, along with deep domain expertise in virtualization, cloud computing, enterprise management software and UNIX and Linux environments. He had previously led VMware’s EMEA enterprise management initiative, and held senior technical roles with SGI, Sun and EMC.
MapR doubled the size of its European staff in the last six months. The company touts that it has established office partner representatives in the UK, Southern Europe, DACH and the Nordic countries since opening its EMEA headquarters in January this year.

Earlier this month, MapR rival Hortonworks revealed that co-founder Eric Baldeschwieler resigned as CTO. He has been replaced by Terracotta founder Ari Zilka, who previously served as the startup’s chief products officer.