MapR is very comfortable with its position in the marketplace, according to Jack Norris, the analytics firm’s CMO. “The article in Forbes says it best: MapR had it right all along.” He is referring to its production-class ready Hadoop offerings. Norris stopped by theCube to talk with show hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante about MapR and its leadership as a Hadoop Technology deployment platform.

When filtering through the noise with Hadoop and Big Data, Norris suggested 3 key areas on which to focus:

1. How it integrates into your enterprise
2. Dependability – high availability and data protection (Snapshots), disaster recovering, mirroring, all across clusters across the WAN.
3. Performance

Speaking of performance, MapR announced this week a new world record for MinuteSort, sorting 15 billion 100-byte records (a total of 1.5 trillion bytes) in 60 seconds using Google Compute Engine and the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop. MapR’s record-setting benchmark was completed on 2,103 virtual instances in the Google Compute Engine. That is a total of 8,412 virtual cores and 2,103 virtual disks. For context, the previous Hadoop MinuteSort record which was 578 GB.

MapR is firmly entrenched as a leader in the Hadoop Technology. When asked about the conversations he is hearing from customers on moving to the cloud and where they stand on moving, Norris gave the implication that more and more customers are wanting to do so, and his company is happy to help that transition.

An interesting question towards the end of Norris’ interview lends itself well to those making “bets” in the Hadoop wold. When asked about Interactive SQL Norris said, “Interactive SQL is one of many use cases that need to run across Big Data platforms. It’s a piece, but it’s not the big driver. What we’ve seen is a high reveal rate for machine data.” It’s worth mentioning because what one could extract from that is that when it comes to Big Data, don’t over-invest in a language on Hadoop — they all have some level of value.

MapR, again, is very comfortable with its market position. The confidence Norris showed was palpable, but by all observations he has plenty reason to be smug when answering questions about MapR’s plans in 2013. “We’ve got a huge lead when it comes to mission critical enterprise grade features.” MapR does, and they don’t show any signs of slowing down.

See Norris’ full segment below: