MapR Announce $110 Million Funding To Heat Up Hadoop Market

When you think about premium Hadoop distributors, two names might spring to mind- Cloudera and Hortonworks. But MapR are determined to make this market a three-horse race. The company has raised $110 million in a new funding round — $80 million in equity, $30 million in debt. Google Capital and Qualcomm Ventures led the equity round with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA, and Redpoint Ventures also participating. Silicon Valley Bank led the debt financing.

MapR co-founder and chief executive John Shroeder is keen to emphasise that growth in the company has been healthy. He claims bookings have tripled over the first quarter of the year, and that MapR counts Ancestry.com, Beats music andSamsung amongst its client base. “Our value proposition is really strong with companies that have serious applications to run in production”, he stated.

Mike Gualtieri, a Forrester analyst has also spoken out about his confidence in MapR. “MapR has been a bit under the radar compared to Cloudera and Hortonworks, but they have an extremely strong solution and large-scale customers. This round of funding will help them get their message out,” he said. “This substantial round of financing led by Google says a lot about the nascent Hadoop market. There is no de-facto commercial distro. The heat is on, and it is getting hotter”.

Currently most MapR customers (and indeed, most entreprise Hadoop users across the market) are deploying the software on in-house data warehouses. But as more and more companies move to the cloud, MapR is in a strong position; its cloud services are run on CenturyLink’s cloud, the Google Compute Engine and Amazon Web Services. Schroeder also claims that MapR has the edge in terms of availability, with 99.999% high availability on certain MapR editions.

Last week, we speculated about the end of MapReduce when Google announced it had scrapped the system in favour of the bigger, faster Cloud Dataflow. Yet with Google and other big names continuing to invest in Hadoop-related technologies, it certainly seems the market is still healthy for now- and still competitive.