Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What does MapR sell?

Jack Norris: We’re a software company. We’re providing the distribution so that organizations can leverage this and impact their business.

Sramana Mitra: You’re selling software on top of Hadoop? Is this an application on top of Hadoop?

Jack Norris: Hadoop is not just a single thing. It’s a series of components – Sqoop, Oozie, Flume. All of them have different names. It sits on top of the Hadoop distributed file system that accesses a persistent store for the data. That Hadoop distributed file system has a Java component that uses Linux file system.

We’ve innovated on that component and we’ve moved from the storage medium to a random read-write. What MapR has done is we’ve innovated at that underlying storage layer that provides these enterprise-grade protection, more scalability, more speed, and more manageability. We also provide a management console that sits on the side of that.

It allows organizations to use open source in a much more scalable mission-critical way and build applications on top of that. When you say open source and think of the business model, most of the Red Hat approach was done at the commoditization stage of software. There’s relatively early Big Data technologies. There’s a lot of feature completeness that’s required.

We were able to focus on that underlying layer and improve it dramatically. You get the open source and continued innovation there, plus the differentiated capabilities underneath. We make that available in a free community edition and then there’s the enterprise edition that provides full support in some of the more advanced features.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company?

Jack Norris: Yes, we’ve raised over $170 million. Google Capital is an investor as well as some top tier VCs such as Lightspeed, Mayfield, NEA, and Red Point.

Sramana Mitra: Who’s the ideal customer that uses your product?

Jack Norris: There are really two types of companies in the Big Data space. There are those that are in the Web 2.0 where the ability to manipulate data is core to their business, for example companies like Rubicon Project and Return Path. There’s the other type that are more of the established enterprises where they’re looking at better leveraging data to make them more competitive. These are the major retailers, banks, and healthcare companies.

We sell across industries. We have over 700 paying customers and we see deep adoption across verticals. If you look in aggregate, over a trillion dollars in retail transactions are analyzed with MapR. You got 95% of the Internet traffic that’s profiled with MapR. It’s amazing how much impact our customers are making on top of our platform.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR
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