HPE exec: MapR's troubles didn't influence our decision to acquire

Acquisition of data platform's business assets will include employees and property, VP of big data confirms

Data platform company MapR's recent financial struggles didn't influence HPE's decision to acquire its business assets, according to Patrick Osborne, VP of big data and secondary storage at the vendor.

MapR is a 10-year-old data platform company that uses artificial intelligence and analytics. It had raised $280m (£230.5m) in investment over the years but has been struggling in recent months, disclosing in May that imminent closure was likely.

HPE acquired the one-time unicorn for an undisclosed sum this week.

When asked by CRN whether there was any hesitancy on the tech giant's part about acquiring the financially troubled MapR, Osborne (pictured) - who is in charge of the integration of MapR into HPE - replied that its technology and customer set speak for itself.

"A lot has been recognised as very good technology, by the marquee set of customers that have deployed on them," he explained.

"MapR is very well known in the industry as having a very scalable solution, so I'm really focused on making that work within the HPE ecosystem.

"We think the technology is great, they have some really great people on product delivery and customer success, and we're just going to continue to build on that.

"I'm very excited at the prospect of them joining in a number of integration opportunities that we're going to have."

HPE and MapR have a number of overlapping customers and the purchase of the data platform specialist expands HPE's Intelligent Data platform capabilities, which it has been developing for the past two years, according to Osborne.

"We really wanted to add MapR to the portfolio to be the Data Fabric layer to help support those applications," he said.

"They've got some unique capabilities, not only in scale and enterprise resiliency but also some pretty cool use cases around the edge, the core analytics, servicing AI and machine learning apps.

"Certainly a lot of their customers are either interested in or currently doing hybrid cloud deployment with their technology.

"For us, it's another area that we're going to bring to our customers who are certainly using AI and analytics to affect their digital transformation."

Osborne confirmed that the acquisition of MapR's business assets will include its employees as well as its technology, intellectual property, and domain expertise.

It will also take on its property, but Osborne added that the ultimate plan is to "co-locate" everyone to HPE's new HQ in San Jose.

Much like the BlueData acquisition last year, MapR will assist HPE in developing and delivering AI, machine learning and analytics applications to customers who are starting to identify as digital businesses.

"I think [this acquisition] signals to the market that HPE is very serious about this new ecosystem of Kubernetes, containers and hybrid cloud," he said.

"A lot of the applications that customers are developing right now and spending their budget on is around AI and analytics. We want to provide a scalable solution for them to deploy those applications and the infrastructure to run them.

"It's a very data-driven economy these days. If you talk to some of the large financial institution manufacturers, they're identifying themselves as technology companies now, working in specific verticals.

"We want to be at the forefront of that so I think it's a really fun space and HPE certainly wants to play in that space and win and service our customers."