At O'Reilly Strata Conference + Hadoop World 2014 in New York City today, Hadoop distribution specialist MapR Technologies announced that its MapR-DB NoSQL key-value database is now available for unlimited production use as part of its free MapR Community Edition.
MapR CMO Jack Norris says MapR chose to make its in-Hadoop NoSQL database freely available through its Community Edition to expose more companies and developers to the capabilities of MapR.
"We wanted to make it that much more accessible to the market," he says.
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Norris notes that an increasing number of organizations seek to create operational analytic environments that require a balanced combination of reads, writes and analytics in applications ranging from fraud detection/prevention to real-time product recommendations and user authentication. At the same time, customers are putting in place real-time transactional or streaming applications based on the sensor data and log analytics.
Typically, he says, organizations need separate sets of technologies to handle database operations and analytical jobs, and that results in highly complex architectures. MapR's proposition is to handle both requirements with one platform.
Businesses are looking to increase their agility and response time, Norris says. "Everything from telecom to financial services, retail, media and healthcare needs a platform that can ingest data from a variety of sources in conjunction with transaction information and do not only file-level processing, but can combine that with real-time database functionality."
MapR Customer Survey Shows Significant ROI
MapR also announced the results of a survey of its customers by research organization TechValidate, which found that a majority of its customers -- those that have gone with its enterprise edition -- experienced payback in less than 12 months with greater than five times the return on their investment.
[ Related: MapR Extends Hadoop's Reach With Big Data App Gallery ]
Norris notes that 50 of the customers that responded to the survey said they had experience with other Hadoop distributions. Of that group, 65 percent reported greater than five times the ROI, and 40 percent said they achieved greater than 10X returns.
Many respondents cited high availability, data integration, data protection and multi-tenancy as their reasons for choosing the MapR distribution. Nearly 80 percent said the MapR in-Hadoop database was a significant differentiator.
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