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August 5, 2019updated 06 Aug 2019 11:41am

HPE Buys MapR Assets, to Roll Stricken Firm into its Data Storage Business

"We are currently working with MapR on transition plans and this includes MapR employees."

By CBR Staff Writer

Updated August 6, 10.25 BST to correct HPE quote on MapR transition plan. 

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has bought up the business assets of stricken data platform provider MapR for an undisclosed sum.

The transaction includes MapR’s technology, intellectual property, and domain expertise in AI and machine learning, HPE said.

“HPE is now working to transition the employees, partners and customers.

“HPE will be contacting them to discuss how to support existing deployments along with ongoing renewals. We are currently working with MapR on transition plans and this includes MapR employees. We anticipate a number of MapR employees will join HPE’s Storage business unit,” the company said.

HPE MapR Acquisition: Deal Comes as Investors Pulled the Plug

The announcement comes after the backers of MapR – which started out as an Apache Hadoop specialist, won backing from Google Capital and was considered an lodestar of the big data analytics space, earning unicorn status – pulled their funding.

(It now offers an integrated data analytics platform

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MapR told staff it was laying them off in late-May.

“As a result of this notice, you should expect that your employment with the company will terminate not later than June 14, 2019. There is no provision in the company for transfer, bumping, or reassignment,” the company said.

That decision followed desperately poor results in its fiscal 2020 Q1.

It managed to keep trading amid interest from a number of reported suitors, and is understood to still have some 120 staff.

The company said in a short statement: “The engineering team will continue to innovate in the areas customers have indicated are important, such as seamless edge integration and ways to embrace hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The support team will continue to support your success. The Professional Support team will continue to engage with you and our key partners as needed.”

HPE’s Welcome

“HPE welcomes MapR customers and partners and plans to support existing deployments along with ongoing renewals” HPE said. “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,” said Antonio Neri, HPE president and CEO.

“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 company added: “This asset acquisition accelerates HPE’s Intelligent Data Platform capabilities and helps customers optimize workload solutions for mission-critical big-data workflows – whether they are cloud-native or on-premises.”

MapR’s Data Platform lets users store, manage, process, and analyse data – including files, tables, and streams from operational, historical, and real-time data sources. It runs on commodity hardware across on-premises, cloud, and edge deployments.

MapR includes a wide variety of analytics and open source tools such as Apache HadoopApache HBaseApache SparkApache Drill, and Apache Hive. With support for POSIX, cutting-edge AI and ML tools like new Python ML libraries can run natively on the same cluster as other analytics and leverage the power of the MapR Data Platform.

Data analytics providers like MapR have struggled in the face of growing competition from hyperscale public cloud providers.

The acquisition follows HPE’s decision  seven weeks earlier to buy supercomputer company Cray for $1.3 billion

See also: The Cloudera Bloodbath Continues: CEO Quits, Customer Churn Spikes, Stock Tanks

 

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