MapR appoints Nextgen as first A/NZ distributor

Nextgen Group CEO John Walters

Converged data platform provider MapR has appointed Nextgen Distribution as its first distributor in the Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) market.

The new distribution relationship was prompted by the growth MapR has been experiencing since launching in the Australian market about four years ago.

“We really liked Nextgen’s model and their aspect of community building, which is hugely powerful in the Australian market, and it’s not easy to give a community that importance it deserves,” MapR international markets senior director of alliances and channel Derek Judge said.

MapR has been accumulating customers across major market segments such as finance and retail. Its platform works across software frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark and open source environments.  

“In Australia, we’ve now got a large amount of customers in production, and we’re working with Nextgen to help us with that expansion,” he said.

Judge gave an example of one banking customer using the platform to help detect fraudulent usage of customer credit cards and then potentially using that data on customer purchases for marketing purposes.

“We see a huge potential for partners, not just in the initial infrastructure stage, but in expanding that further and delivering more value on top the infrastructure,” he said.

MapR has a global partner program called Converge, where partners can gain access to deal registration, referrals, online training and demonstration software.

“There are few partners in the market that have been into data warehousing and business intelligence projects, and they’re well into providing the business value case for customers, and that’s one set of partners that we’re after,” he said. 

“We also get a lot partners that are interested in cloud deployments, and we’re getting into a lot of interesting discussions with customers that have to get involved in multi-cloud deployments for regulatory purposes.

“MapR is really good at taking big data and putting it into production. We’re seeing a maturity in the Australian market. Up to about a year ago, a lot of companies were just in pilot mode, and what we’re seeing now is companies taking this more seriously into production,” Judge said. 

“Whether companies want to store huge amounts of data and then want to analyse it, or run machine learning and artificial intelligence, we’re the most production-ready data platform," he said.

According to Judge, one of the company's strongest markets at the moment is Japan, where about 80 - 90 per cent of customers are running Hadoop workloads in production.

“They need a data platform that is reliable, scalable and don’t necessarily need an army of administrators to keep it up and running,” he said.

In December, MapR hired former IBM talent, Paul Bennett, as its new country manager for its Australian and New Zealand operations.