Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have some sort of a program where you invite or encourage entrepreneurs to build on top of the MapR platform?

Jack Norris: According to industry analysts like Gartner, the knowledge acquisition for Hadoop is the biggest hurdle for adoption. That’s an area that we’ve really invested heavily in. Just last quarter, we’ve introduced free on-demand Hadoop training. There are separate tracks for developers, administrators, and analysts with multiple classes in each track. It can lead to full certification. The focus there is getting people knowledgeable about Hadoop. What are the use cases? What can you do? That’s been incredibly well-received. We’ve had over 20,000 enrollees in less than a quarter. That’s one area where people can start and try to understand the potential.

The second big investment that we’ve made is pioneering the Apache Drill project, which just released for general availability (GA) this week. That’s a completely open-source project available through Apache. We’ve announced that inclusion in our distribution with support as well. That project really puts data exploration in the hands of business analysts and data scientists because it allows you to query and deal with data without requiring IT to set up schemas or do any sort of extract, transform, or load. It’s built for these new modern data formats – output from log files and sensors that can be dynamic and rapidly changing. It works directly on those.

One of the big areas is Internet of Things. New data sources are growing rapidly. How do you best leverage those when there’s a tool now that gives you that ability to see the data, manipulate it, and understand it much faster than ever before?

Sramana Mitra: Very good. One thing that I was expecting to see and I’m sure you’re going to probably going to think about it downstream is given what you said about some of these other applications from new companies that are building on your new platform and coming up with vertical applications, you’re going to see some sort of developer ecosystem developing like SAP’s One Startup Focus. All the large companies who have developer ecosystems have one of these programs. I’m wondering if that’s the direction you were going?

Jack Norris: We’ve got a community that’s formed around this on-demand training. We’ve got community editions of the software. It’s easy for them to get up to speed and experiment including our MapR DB that allows real-time database manipulations. We’ve got quick start programs that allow individuals or organizations to quickly deploy.

Sramana Mitra: I appreciate your time. Thank you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR
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