MapR, which provides enterprise-grade distribution for Apache Hadoop, has announced the appointment of Kim Williams as its worldwide vice president of services and support. As the new VP, Williams will be responsible for managing MapR’s professional services, support teams, and customer training. Williams joins MapR at a time when big data is big news in enterprise.

Prior to joining MapR, Williams served at Blue Coat Systems as the company’s vice president of worldwide technical services. According to MapR, her customer service and support experience over the course of her career makes her an ideal fit for the company. CEO and Co-founder John Schroeder said of Williams, “Her focus on delivering customer satisfaction and building world-class services organizations demonstrates she has the leadership skills necessary to manage our rapid growth.”

MapR provides big data services through partnerships with a number of well-known IT companies, including Google, EMC, Cisco, and Amazon. MapR has leveraged the power of Apache Hadoop to help businesses manage and analyze big data, coupled with full data protection, no single point of failure, and other unique features. Some key features include: mounting of a Hadoop cluster with Direct Access NFS, point-in-time recovery with MapR Snapshots, synchronized data across clusters with mirroring, and the ability to scale up to create an unlimited number of files.

Apache Hadoop is a java-based free and open source distributed file system that can handle massive amounts of data from multiple distributed applications. It is a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation and has received financial and technical assistance from the developer community and major IT companies.

MapR M3 Edition is available for free use on production servers, while the M5 Edition is available on a subscription basis. Those interested in using MapR on the cloud can find it at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce Service (EMR).