Mere weeks after Cloudera earned funding support from Intel for its Hadoop-driven Big Data platform, rival MapR revealed its own massive round of $110 million in combined equity and debt financing. The $80 million growth capital portion of this round was led by Google Capital, hinting at the search giant’s own vision for the business of Big Data. Qualcomm Ventures also participated in MapR’s latest funding round, along with existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and Redpoint Ventures.

In addition to the equity poured into MapR, the company also raised $30 million in debt financing led by Silicon Valley Bank. Altogether, MapR has raised $174 million in financing, including a $30 million Series C round last year.

Today’s funding news levels the playing field for the three top service providers in Hadoop distros.  Cloudera raised $900 million in March, with more than 80% of that total coming from Intel. At around the same time, Hortonworks raised $100 million led by BlackRock and Passport Capital.    “MapR rounds out the 100m+ funding club with mega validation.  Three years ago many in the industry thought MapR wouldn’t emerge as a serious player so this news certainly puts an end to that idea.  MapR has been quietly building a world class enterprise solution around opensource Hadoop and the years of working with Google cloud has paid off”,  says John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE and cohost of @theCUBE.

Supporting the balance of open source & proprietary tech

What could Google have in mind for its investment in MapR? According to Dan Woods, CTO of CITO Research, MapR’s approach to technology development is similar to the search giant’s.  “Google…understands the power of combining open source and proprietary technology,” Woods wrote in a Forbes article. “Remember, when you click on ‘Google Search’ almost all of the code that runs was written by Google and is not open source. Google understands that the best experience comes from the best product that is engineered without any prejudice.”

The MapR business model is distinct from Cloudera’s and Hortonworks’ in that it seeks to strike a balance between open source and proprietary technology. While Cloudera focuses on layering paid services atop Hadoop’s foundation, Hortonworks says it’s dedicated to maintaining Hadoop’s pure open source nature. MapR’s approach is simlar to Cloudera’s.

“This isn’t an architectural change; this is an architectural innovation,” explained Jack Norris, MapR CMO in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE. Norris  said said MapR’s hybrid approach of combining open source and proprietary code makes it “easier for folks to get to much faster.”

Slow-rolling IPOs

While today’s round shows Google’s support of MapR’s hybrid business model, the funding also provides MapR the capital it needs to hold off on an initial public offering. Silicon Valley companies these days are shunning rapid IPOs,  preferring to focus instead on long-term stability without the distractions of compliance, quarterly reporting and the expense of  accountants and lawyers. for longer, according to Wikibon founder and chief analyst David Vellante,

“Why go public and be exposed to market fluctuations, especially when the market has been fairly hot and many companies feel over-valued?” Vellante said. “Better to stay private for a while longer.”

That’s especially true for companies that can raise nine-figure private funding rounds.

HP Relationship Paying Off?

Recently, Colin Mahony (VP & GM of HP Vertica) and John Schroeder (CEO of MapR) talk with John Furrier about their recent partnership, the state of the market and the challenges of the developers.  See interview below.

Mahony from HP comments, “We are really excited about our relationship with MapR; we’re combining two great solutions so that customers who want to take advantage of big data (or any data), can do it seamlessly. What Vertica brings to the table, is an incredible MPP SQL analytics platform, but when you think about the big data lake, it just makes sense that you can have a single environment where you can do anything you want against the data. Like with most great partnerships, it’s really customer-driven.”

Praising their business model,  Furrier asked the MapR CEO to elaborate on his company and what sets it apart.

“We’re more like Splunk than Red Hat; we build technology and bring it to market. Over the last year we’ve had a tremendous amount of activity around SQL and Hadoop,” said Schroeder.

Not long ago  Schroeder predicted that “SQL is going to be the most exciting and disappointing technology for 2014 because the state of technology was not in the state that the customers thought it would be.”

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