MapR has opened a new office in London to serve as its European headquarters. The Hadoop distributor says that the outlet will provide more direct technical support and sales assistance to clients in the entire EMEA region.

The man in charge of MapR’s UK HQ is Steve Jenkins, who talked a bit about the significance of his company’s strategic expansion across the pond.

“Our value proposition is we remove the complexity but also make [Hadoop] enterprise-ready,” Jenkins said.  “I think many customers start playing with big data and they acknowledge it can add value to their business, and then they start getting serious and need to make sure it is reliable. Instead of taking two days to get something out, they can get it in 10 minutes.”

The executive added that MapR has “a relationship with Cisco, HP and EMC, and we have already partnered with Google and Amazon. What Hadoop didn’t have was enterprise features such as snapshotting and high availability.”

In the coming months Jenkins and his two colleagues at the London branch will work on growing MapR’s European partner ecosystem. The company already allied itself with Big Data Partnership, and now it’s on the hunt for more system integrators and resellers that can inject additional value into its offering.

The analytics scene is teeming with activity right now. HortonWorks just introduced the newest release of its flagship Hadoop distro, a faster and simpler version of its predecessor.

V1.2 incorporates an open-source Hadoop provisioning tool, and features several homegrown enhancements as well. The HortonWorks edition of HBase is more powerful and scalable; revisions to the HDP architecture makes the platform a lot easier to secure; and Hive supports concurrent query connections.