MapR Extends Hadoop’s Reach With Big Data App Gallery

MapR Technologies, provider of the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop, added a new dimension to the big data market today with the launch of a Hadoop application gallery, which features ready-made big data utilities and applications for developers, administrators and analysts.

“This is the first of its kind,” says Steve Wooledge, vice president of product marketing for MapR Technologies. “It’s a showcase of different applications that people are building for Hadoop. A lot of customers don’t know what the use cases are and don’t know how to apply Hadoop to their business. This helps customers understand what they can do with MapR.”

The MapR App Gallery, announced at Hadoop Summit in San Jose, features apps, query engines and frameworks for developers; provisioning, management and security apps for administrators; and business intelligence and machine learning apps for analysts. The solutions come from a wide range of ecosystem partners.

[Related: MapR’s New Hadoop Distribution Promises No-Risk Upgrade]

The App Gallery contributors have all verified that their applications interoperate with the MapR Distribution with documentation and support information provided for each application.

Among the partners and solutions are the following:

• Database: Hadapt, Rainstor, Simba and Splice Machine
• Analytics and Data Integration: Alpine Data Labs, Appfluent, Datameer, DataTorrent, Informatica, Information Builders, Jaspersoft, Data Tactics, Pentaho, Platfora, Revelytics, Revolution Analytics, Syncsort and Tableau
• Search: Elasticsearch and LucidWorks
• Machine Learning: Oxdata, Skytree and Zementis
• Management and Security: Dataguise, Splunk, StackIQ and Voltage

“Our customers typically run many different applications on a MapR cluster and the App Gallery makes it much easier and faster for customers to be successful,” says Jack Norris, chief marketing officer of MapR Technologies. “There is already a broad range of applications available, and we anticipate the number of applications will grow — particularly those that leverage unique capabilities of MapR and enable customers to better optimize revenue, control costs and mitigate risks.”

[Related: 10 Hot Hadoop Startups to Watch]

“What’s unique about MapR is, because we support NFS, a lot of third-party applications that developers have that can run on a Linux file system can run directly on MapR,” Wooledge adds. “They don’t have to write new code. There’s a lot of great apps out there that people have already written. MapR can support a lot of those applications out of the box.”

Wooledge notes that developers can submit new applications directly to the App Gallery.

Partnership Optimizes Hadoop ETL Software on MapR

MapR also announced a partnership with big data integration specialist Syncsort and the certification of the Syncsort DMX-H Hadoop extract/transform/load (ETL) software on MapR distribution.

The DMX-H ETL software is designed to help customers optimize their data warehouses and expensive legacy platforms by offloading heavy processing into a Hadoop environment. Wooledge notes that many customers are turning to DMX-H to avoid the skills gap that is arising as older IT professionals with mainframe expertise retire. Data-driven organizations can use DMX-H to migrate from mainframes to modern data architectures.

[Related: Hadoop Gets More Search with Mapr, Cloudera Releases]

“We see many businesses that recognize the cost and capability advantages of shifting from legacy systems to modern architectures,” says Jon Posnik, vice president of business development at MapR Technologies. “Our partnership with Syncsort gives customers a complete solution for easily migrating their critical business data to the MapR Distribution for Hadoop.”

The partners already have five joint customers, including Internet analytics company comScore and information services specialist Experian.

“With the help of enterprise-grade Hadoop solutions from MapR and Syncsort, offloading data from mainframe and SAN systems has increased our performance at reduced costs,” says Tom Thomas, IT director at Experian.

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Thor Olavsrud covers IT Security, Big Data, Open Source, Microsoft Tools and Servers for CIO.com. Follow Thor on Twitter @ThorOlavsrud. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn.