MapR released a list of customer wins from the past 12 months, and things are looking  up.  The Hadoop distributor experienced a spike in demand for its analytics software last year, especially from large consumer-facing organizations.

MapR says that currently 10 of the Fortune 100 are leveraging its Hadoop distribution to gain a better understanding of their business. Clients include a “well-established U.S. retailer“ that acquired an initial 2,500 node license to optimize the price of merchandise, and a major financial services firm that deployed the MapR Distribution on 1000 nodes to combat fraud and develop new ways to cash in on transactions.

One of the largest wireless communications companies in the U.S. is another recent customer, the analytics firm boasts. The unnamed telco apparently saves “millions of dollars per year” by leveraging MapR’s software for ETL offloading of its main data warehouse.

The company landed several other major deals in 2012. That includes licensing agreements with multiple manufacturers that leverage big data to improve quality control, and an alliance with a U.S. healthcare provider that is looking to get into the analytics business.

MapR estimates that the thousands of Hadoop deployments running its software are used to crunch through hundreds of billions of objects a day, including 90 percent of the internet population and a substantial portion of the retail transactions carried out worldwide.

“As we close out 2012, our significant customer wins and market traction acknowledge our technology leadership and pioneering product innovation,” said John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder, MapR Technologies. “We have already enabled thousands of customers to better manage and analyze Big Data and we look forward to extending our position as a leader by adding value to Hadoop where it matters most to our customers.”

MapR is very aggressive about its ecosystem. A few months ago it announced a strategic partnership with Nimbula to make its software viable for private cloud deployments, and today it is pursuing new opportunities in Europe. EMEA headquarters head Steve Jenkins says that MapR is seeking to strengthen relations with local channel partners  and start targeting potential customers in the region.