MapR Technologies, a provider of a Hadoop distribution that is tailored for mission-critical application environments, today announced two simultaneous initiatives designed to make its platform more accessible.
Via a partnership with Canonical, the company is making its distribution of Hadoop available with Ubuntu, the distribution of Linux that has been developed by Canonical. Secondly, MapR says it will now make the source code for its distribution of Hadoop available on Github, which promises to make it easier to developers to fine-tune applications built on top of the MapR Hadoop distribution.
According to Tomer Shiran, director of product marketing for MapR, both initiatives are designed to make it easier for developers to gain access to the fundamental building blocks they need to build applications on top of Hadoop. Right now, the race to recruit those developers is ultimately what will determine the success of one Hadoop distribution or another.
With more vendors rolling out distributions of Hadoop, the latest of which comes from Intel, competition over a rapidly expanding Hadoop market is nothing short of fierce. With most of those applications expected to replace data warehouse applications that are orders of magnitude more expensive to build, maintain and deploy, Shiran says Hadoop applications are rapidly moving from pilot to production.
Obviously, it will take years for this data warehouse transition to play out. But once it does, the way end users go about finding information will never be the same again.
