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eWEEK is building a new IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market.
Today: Company Name: MapR Technologies (data platform for AI and analytics)
Company description: Today, companies are focused on digital transformation. Beyond merely using data for analytics, companies are building new products and services with data to create new sources of revenue and business models. MapR Technologies, a Santa Clara, CA-headquartered software company, pioneered a data fabric for all data across every cloud and integrates processing and analytics for modern data-driven applications that are disrupting industries from energy to manufacturing to autonomous driving and healthcare. Founded in 2009, John Schroeder is founder and CEO of privately held MapR.
At the core is the MapR Data Platform that enables simultaneous analytics and applications as data happens for companies to create new, intelligent and modern applications. The MapR Data Platform integrates Hadoop, Spark, and Apache Drill with real-time database capabilities, global event streaming, and scalable enterprise storage to power a new generation of big data applications. It also includes a natively integrated Kubernetes volume driver to provide persistent storage volumes for access to any data – from databases, files and streaming––located on-premises, across clouds and to the edge. The MapR Platform delivers enterprise grade security, reliability, and real-time performance while dramatically lowering both hardware and operational costs of your most important applications and data.
MapR supports dozens of open source projects and is committed to using industry-standard APIs to provide a frictionless method of developing and deploying exciting new applications that can meet the most stringent production runtime requirements.
Markets: Artificial Intelligence and Analytics, Cloud, IoT and Edge Analytics, Containers, Big Data, Telecommunications, Health Care, Financial Services, Retail, Media and Entertainment, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Public Sector.
International Operations: United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Australia, India
Products and Services
The MapR Data Platform simultaneously performs analytics and applications with speed, scale, and reliability. It converges all data into a data fabric that can store, manage, process, apply, and analyze as data happens.
MapR-XD is a highly scalable storage platform for high-volume enterprise storage, in-place analytics of unstructured data, and archival and protection of critical data. MapR-XD bridges the gap between traditional and new-age applications, and serves as the foundation for your data fabric across edge, on-premises and cloud.
MapR Analytics and Machine Learning Engines include all of the tools needed to conduct real-time analytics and machine learning at scale, backed by the industry’s only platform that integrates files, tables and streams.
MapR-DB is a high performance NoSQL database for global data-intensive applications build on the MapR Data Platform. It is a scalable, multi-model database that brings together operational applications, analytical applications and real-time streaming, and other workloads to enable next-gen user experiences and business processes.
MapR-ES is a global publish-subscribe event streaming system for big data. It is the first big data scale streaming system built into a converged data platform and the only big data streaming system to support infinite data persistence and global event replication reliably at IoT scale.
MapR-Edge is a small footprint edition of the MapR Converged Data Platform that addresses the need to capture, process, and analyze IoT data close to the source.
Key Features
The MapR Data Platform supports:
- AI and Analytics on a single platform
- Persisted streaming for IoT Edge analytics
- AI/ML model and version management
- Stateful application containerization
- Hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud environments
- Global distributed file and object data fabric
- Single security model
- Global disaster recovery, data protection, point in time recovery
- Easy enterprise integration: NFS, POSIX, S3
Insight and Analysis
MapR generally gets very good reviews for its product performance. IT Central Station has a long list of peer-to-peer reviews here. Some representative comments:
What is most valuable about MapR? “MapR’s strength comes from its file system. Because they start with the raw disk, they are able to expose the storage through various APIs and have the ability to lockdown and secure the file system better than the Apache derivatives, which store the file blocks above the Linux file system.”
“Because of MapR’s POSIX compliant file system, they can support read/write files over the WORM storage of their competitors. In addition, they remodeled how to track and store the blocks. So the NameNode isn’t a single point of failure and you can store a magnitude of multiple orders of small files before you can cause a volume to have issues.”
What needs improvement? “All products have room for improvement. Because of MapR-FS, they have an incredible advantage in terms of stability, cross cluster replication, and extensibility to create products like MapR-DB (Binary and JSON tables) and MapR Streams.”
“One weakness for MapR is the Kerberos support. This is not much of an issue unless you rely on products in a secure environment that only support Kerberos. This really occurs with HBase. The lack of coprocessors is also an issue because MapR-DB is limited in terms of server side extensibility. While MapR can and is improving on this with their next release(s), if they were to implement coprocessors, it would most likely not be compatible with Apache’s release.”
G2 Crowd, another peer-to-peer review site resource, gives MapR four stars out of five overall. Sample comment:
What do you like best? “Enterprise ready solution for big data use cases. It is by far the best solution from performance and feature set perspective comparing to its competitors. MapR streams and spyglass is something I like the most along with proprietary formula around MapR FS and Spark integration. Support is fantastic and have not introduced managed service option which works for many of the companies to avoid the complexities.”
What do you dislike? “Pricing complexities, Complexities around architecture and no well defined use cases along with POC results and performance results and comparison against competitors.”
Gartner Peer Reviews has a large number of product evaluations here. As of Nov. 29, there were 26 four- or five-star ratings on the list, with only one three-star review and no one-star or no-star reviews. Sample comments:
What do you like most about the product or service? The converged platform of MapR really resonanted with us. The Mapr File System was also a strong feature in favor of MapR.
What do you dislike most about the product or service? Not as complete as say a Cloudera or Hortonworks on Security and Metadata.
Would you recommend this product or service to others? Yes
Overall eWEEK rating: 4½ stars out of 5. MapR has one of the most consistently high ratings in its market.
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List of current customers: TransUnion, United Healthcare, Solutionary, SAP, Rubicon, Novartis, Publishers Clearing House, Ericsson, Experian, Cisco, comScore
Delivery: Software (cloud, on-premises, Hybrid cloud)
Pricing: MapR provides a subscription license on a one year and 3-year basis.
Other key players in this market: Cloudera, Hortonworks, Oracle, MongoDB, Teradata.
Contact information for potential customers: (email, website, phone number or all)
Website: www.mapr.com
Phone: 408-914-2390
Email: [email protected]
Resources
IT Central Station
G2 Crowd
Gartner Peer Reviews