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August 5, 2019

HPE Acquires MapR

MapR Technologies, the struggling distributor of a Hadoop-based platform that has been searching for a buyer for the past few months, today was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

HPE says it the transaction includes MapR’s technology, intellectual property, and domain expertise in AI, machine learning, and analytics data management.

“The explosion of data is creating a new era of intelligence where the winners will be the ones who harness the power of data, wherever it lives,”  HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri says in a press release. “MapR’s file system technology enables HPE to offer a complete portfolio of products to drive artificial intelligence and analytics applications and strengthens our ability to help customers manage their data assets end to end, from edge to cloud.”

The MapR portfolio will bolster HPE’s existing big data offerings, which includes the BlueData software it acquired in November. BlueData’s software delivers a container-based approach for spinning up and managing Hadoop, Spark, and other environments on bare metal, cloud, or hybrid platforms.

MapR’s platform is used by a number of companies for storing and processing large amounts of data. The MapR platform provides a number of capabilities for running distributed applications. The software exposes storage APIs for e S3 API, to go along with APIs for HDFS, POISX, NFS, and Kafka.

“MapR’s enterprise-grade file system and cloud-native storage services complement HPE’s BlueData container platform strategy and will allow us to provide a unique value proposition for customers,” Phil Davis, HPE’s president of Hybrid IT, said in a press release.  “We are pleased to welcome MapR’s world-class team to the HPE family.”

MapR has been searching for a buyer for months in the wake of funding difficulties that were made public in late May. Following a poor first quarter in which a number of customers and prospects postponed software subscriptions, a deal for outside funding collapsed, forcing the company to notify employees of a possible shutdown in operations.

As questions swirled over the future of MapR and Hadoop in general, company officials continued to seek a deal to keep the company running. In June, MapR said it was close to a deal with an unnamed entity. However, the rest of the month and July went by with no deal, and MapR eventually stopped providing updates.

It’s a bittersweet end to MapR’s run. The Santa Clara, California company has raised $280 million in venture funding since it was founded by John Schroeder and M.C. Srivas in 2009. The company raised $56 million nearly two years ago in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Company officials had talked of an IPO for the firm, which at one point had been valued over $1 billion.

Related Items:

HPE Pins AI Hopes on Services

MapR Says It’s Close to Deal to Sell Company

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