Start-Up’s Profile: MapR

Company
MapR Technologies, Inc. (MapReduce is a programming model for processing large data sets)

Location
HQs in San Jose, CA; offices in UK (Windsor, Berks), Germany (Munich), France (Neuilly-Sur-Seine), Japan (Tokyo), India (R&D in Hyderabad)

Year founded
2009

Financial funding
$59 million in three rounds including $20 million in 2011 and $30 million in 2013, investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA, and Redpoint Ventures

Revenues and profitability
No figures revealed but only "in 18 months of activity, 4Q12 revenue was the same amount as for the 15 former months."

Founders and main executives:

• John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder: was CEO of Calista Technologies (Microsoft), CEO of Rainfinity (EMC) and SVP of products and marketing at Brio Technologies.
• M.C. Srivas, CTO and co-founder: was chief architect at Spinnaker Networks (acquired by NetApp) which built a single-box NAS filer, as well as a scalable clustered filer now integrated into Data ONTAP, previously managed the Andrew File System (AFS) engineering team at Transarc (now IBM).
• Jack Norris, CMO: held senior executive roles with EMC, Rainfinity, Brio Technology, SQRIBE, and Bain and Company.
• Ted Dunning, chief application architect: responsible for building an advanced identity theft detection system, as well as a large peer-assisted video distribution systems and music and video recommendations systems, has 15 issued and 15 pending patents and contributes to several Apache open source projects including Hadoop, Zookeeper and Hbase, also committer for Apache Mahout.
• Dave Jespersen, chief customer advocate: has 30 years of  enterprise software development experience in companies including EMC, Sun, Sterling Software, Spectra Logic, Exabyte and DEC.
• Steve Fitz, SVP WW field operations: was president and GM of Avaya U.S. operations and previously held executive positions in general management and sales at Isilon and EMC.
• Xavier Guérin, VP Southern Europe and Benelux: joined MapR at the same time as Aurélien Goujet, SE Director Southern Europe and Benelux, both of them coming from Quantum, EMC, Isilon and NetApp.

Number of employees
140

Technology
It is an Hadoop distribution that allows direct data input and output via NFS with real time analytics and providing HA. It introduces logical volumes to Hadoop. A volume is a way to group data and apply policy across an entire data set.

Product description
It is at the convergence of big data analytics and big data storage. Hadoop used HDFS. MapR’s clustered file system accelerates performance with NFS – speed being an issue for Hadoop -, being seen as a NAS and simplifying access. MapR seems to be the only one that can make HDFS speak NFS. Furthermore, with Hadoop, you need to copy three times the data for analytics. MapR uses fast RAID-0 and compression into its file system, reducing storage needs by 30% to 40%. It integrates functionalities like mirroring, snapshots and replication.

                          One platform for big data

In a press release MapR announced at the O’Reilly Strata Conference it was able to sort 1.5TB records in 60 seconds using 2,103 virtual instances in the Google Compute Engine. Each virtual instance consisted of four virtual cores and one virtual disk, for a total of 8,412 virtual cores and 2,103 virtual disks.

In a customer’s profile published by MapR, you can read that comScore was able to use 100 rather than 200 servers and no more external storage, spending $1.2 million rather than $2.7 million for its big data analytics application with MapR M5 distribution replacing Cloudera distribution.

Price of the three editions available

• M3: free download (includes HBase, Pig, Hive, Mahout, Cascading, Sqoop, Flume)
• M5: enterprise edition at €3,500 per year and per node (includes also HA and data protection features such as JobTracker HA, No NameNode HA, snapshots and mirroring)
• M7: €4,900 per year and per node (enterprise platform for NoSQL and Hadoop)

Roadmap
Towards SQL to access results of analytics

Partners
Among them AllianceONE, Bpm-Conseil (Vanilla), Calxeda, Cisco, Cisco, Concurrent, Dataguise, Datameer, Digital Reasoning, EMC (via Greeplum), Fusion-io, IBM,  Informatica, Karmasphere, Lucid Imagination, Mellanox, MicroStrategy, Narus, NetApp, Netezza (IBM), Nimbula, Pentaho, Quest Software, RainStor, Red Hat, Revelytix, Revolution Analytics, SAP, SAS, sqrrl, StackIQ, Syncsort, Tableau Software, Telend, Teradata, Violin Memory, and VMware. There are also Amazon Web Services and Google for cloud computing and storage.

Distribution
Around 50% direct and 50% indirect in USA, exclusively through BI integrators in Europe

Number of customers
Around 1,000 of free downloads or paid customers

Main customers
Ancestry.com, Boeing, Comcast, comScore, McAfee, Vodafone

Target market
Financial services, government, healthcare, information services, manufacturing, media and entertainment, natural resources, retail, transportation, utilities

Competitors
Cloudera, Hortonworks