MapR

» see mapr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Hadoop was free. That is the fact everything else about MapR hangs off. Apache gave away a system for storing a dataset across a few hundred cheap machines and running computations over it where the data already sat, and for about five years in the early 2010s that was the most fashionable idea in enterprise computing. Three companies built businesses on top of something nobody had to pay for. That is a difficult trick, and each of them tried a different version of it.

Cloudera and Hortonworks sold packaging and support around the Apache code. MapR took the harder road: it threw out HDFS, the distributed file system at the bottom of the stack, and shipped its own closed reimplementation in C++. The replacement could be mounted over NFS like an ordinary directory, and it accepted random writes where HDFS insisted on append-only files. It also did away with the single coordinating node whose failure took a whole HDFS cluster down with it. You were not buying a nicer installer. You were buying a different machine that spoke the same language.

John Schroeder and M.C. Srivas founded it in Santa Clara in June 2009. The money followed the fashion: nine million dollars to start from Lightspeed and New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint in 2011, thirty million in 2013 led by Mayfield, and a hundred and ten million in 2014 with Google Capital and Qualcomm Ventures in the round. Two hundred and eighty million dollars in total, against a competitor whose price was zero.

~ the record ~

~ the warn notice ~

Companies rarely announce that they are about to die. California makes them. The WARN Act requires written notice before a mass layoff, which is why the first public confirmation of MapR's condition was not a press release but a letter Schroeder sent on 13 May 2019 to his employees and to the state: the company would close operations and lay off 122 people by 14 June unless new financing or a strategic transaction turned up.

The cause he gave was the first quarter, which had ended on 30 April with what he called extremely poor results. At the end of May the company said publicly it had about two weeks to find an investor or shut, and then the date moved to 3 July. A dying enterprise vendor is a slow and very visible thing, because its customers have production clusters on the line and read every filing.

~ what the trough looked like ~

MapR did not fail alone and that is most of the story. Cloudera and Hortonworks, its two rivals, had given up competing and merged in January 2019, six months before the WARN notice. Cloudera's stock then fell 43 percent in a single day, on 6 June, after its chief executive left and it cut its revenue forecast for the year by about ninety million dollars. Computer Weekly's write-up at the time asked whether the collapse was the leading edge of a trough for big data generally, and the answer turned out to be yes.

What had happened underneath was simple enough. The clouds had arrived. If your data sat in S3 and you could point a query engine at it without owning a cluster or employing anyone to keep it alive, the entire premise of buying a Hadoop distribution went away. The three distribution vendors spent the back half of the decade competing fiercely for a market that was quietly draining out from under all of them.

~ where the domain points now ~

Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought the assets on 5 August 2019: the technology and the people who knew how it worked, with around two hundred employees moving across. The price was never disclosed. HPE's public framing was rescue, and for MapR's customers it was one, because the alternative was a production file system with nobody left to answer the phone.

The file system is still shipping. It is sold inside HPE Ezmeral as a data fabric, which is a 2019 word for the thing MapR had been selling since 2011. Ask mapr.com for a page today and the connection times out. Ask www.mapr.com and you get a 301 into hpe.com, onto a product page for data fabric software. That is the tidiest epitaph available to a company whose technology outlived its own name by seven years and counting.

~ the half you could download ~

Apache's half of this story was always something you could fetch and run on whatever hardware was lying around, and for twenty years I have been one of the people doing exactly that with one project or another. MapR's half was never downloadable at all. The C++ that made the company worth $280 million only ever ran under a contract, on clusters signed off by a purchasing committee, and when the company went the code went with it into somebody else's catalog. Apache Hadoop is still sitting there in 2026, free, for anyone who wants it. The part people actually paid for is the part that is gone.

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