Leverage MapR's Resources for Getting Big Data Right

As the Big Data trend marches forward in enterprises and as Hadoop becomes a true open source star driving the trend, MapR Technologies doesn't get quite as much attention as some other players. However, the company offers a slew of informative and helpful posts, videos and educational offerings that can help any enterprise get smart about leveraging Big Data tools, including many free, open source applications. 

Here are just a few resources from MapR to know about.

MapR's CEO has offered up a series of interesting predictions for Big Data in 2015. According to his predictions:

"In 2015, IT will embrace self-service Big Data to allow developers, data scientists and data analysts to directly conduct data exploration. Previously, IT would be required to establish centralized data structures. This is a time consuming and expensive step. Hadoop has made the enterprise comfortable with structure-on-read for some use cases. Advanced organizations will move to data bindings on execution and away from a central structure to fulfill ongoing requirements. This self service speeds organizations in their ability to leverage new data sources and respond to opportunities and threats."

"As organizations move quickly beyond experimentation to serious adoption in the data center, enterprise architects move front and center into the Big Data adoption path. IT leaders will be vital in determining the underlying architectures required to meet SLAs, deliver high availability, business continuity and meet mission-critical needs. In 2014 the booming ecosystem around Hadoop was celebrated with a proliferation of applications, tools and components. In 2015 the market will concentrate on the differences across platforms and the architecture required to integrate Hadoop into the data center and deliver business results."

MapR officials have also been predicting that there is going to be a lot of consolidation in the Hadoop space this year.

As far as resources that companies can leverage to get going with Big Data tools, MapR's site offers many good ones to know about. MapR offers a very useful and flexible Sandbox for Hadoop.  It provides tutorials, demo applications, and browser-based user interfaces to let developers and administrators get started quickly with Hadoop. It is actually a fully functional Hadoop cluster running in a virtual machine. You can try the Sandbox now. It is free and available as a VMware or VirtualBox VM.

MapR's CTO, M.C. Srivas, recently delivered a keynote address at the 2014 Strata Conference + Hadoop World conference in New York City. You can watch a video of his address here, and it focuses on the future of Big Data and how organizations can lay out logical Big Data plans.

MapR also has a huge set of case studies on how customers have leveraged its own and other Big Data tools. And, you can find a library of free webinars on Big Data here. 

"Hadoop continues to show significant evidence of how companies are achieving measurable ROI from storing, processing, analyzing and sharing Big Data," said MapR CEO and Cofounder, John Schroeder. “This is the year that organizations move Big Data deployments beyond initial batch implementations and into real time. This will be driven by the huge strides that existing industry leaders and soon-to-be new leaders have already made by incorporating new Big Data platforms into their operations and integrating analytics with 'in-flight' data to impact business as it happens.”