Competition is heating up in the Hadoop ecosystem as the pure-play distributors move up the stack to address the expanded enterprise checklist for Big Data. With customers shifting their focus from the underlying technologies that make analytics possible to meeting business goals, core considerations such as availability and security have made way for more strategic priorities such as the growing need to make data insights easily accessible to everyday knowledge workers.

Staying passive is not an option. That’s why MapR is going on the offensive with an aggressive product strategy that focuses on plugging the holes in Hadoop and delivering value-added functionality on top. “We solve a lot of business problems, and the way we solve these problems is by combining the best [proprietary] technology with the best of open source,” explained Ted Dunning, Chief Application Architect at MapR, in an exclusive interview on siliconANGLE’s Studio B show at Hadoop Summit 2013. This so-called open core approach culminated in the recent addition of MapReduce 1.0 backwards compatibility and Vertica integration to the MapR distro.

Notwithstanding its strong focus on organic innovation, the company recognizes that tearing down the barriers to Big Data adoption in the enterprise is too big of a task to tackle alone. “We’ve been working with our partners and our customers to make sure that when we release something, it will show them ‘stunning’ benefits,” Dunning said.

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MapR and Jaspersoft announce integration

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The company has found another ally in Jaspersoft, which announced today that its embedded business intelligence (BI) software can now run on the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop. The integration, which comes on the heels of a similar collaboration between Tableau Software and Splunk, means users can turn unstructured information in Hadoop into dashboards and reports—without having to move any data back and forth between some disparate solution.

This can, potentially, go a long way toward fostering adoption and improving productivity. “Most business users do not spend their day inside BI systems, nor do they want to,” Karl Van den Bergh, Customer Relations and Product Head at Jaspersoft, told SiliconANGLE. “They spend their day in a CRM app or an ERP or a productivity suite, you name it; they got their preferred app. Our mission is to bring information intelligence inside the applications where people spend their day.”

MapR customers can deploy Jaspersoft in their private clusters or rent it by the hour on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). The latter option, in particular, represents a big step forward for the BI firm, which has set out to become the “de facto BI of every cloud application” as Van den Bergh put it.

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Watch siliconANGLE’s exclusive interview with MapR‘s Chief Application Architect Ted Dunning below:

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photo credit: subarcticmike via photopin cc

Karl Van den Bergh photo courtesy of theCUBE.

Maria Deutscher contributed to this story.