MapR is the top-ranked distribution for Apache Hadoop and last night's launch follows the recent appointment of Justin Bock as Australia and New Zealand country manager, cementing the company's place in the Asia-Pacific market.

The distributor had also increased its presence in the region significantly in the last six months by establishing an Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore and offices in Japan and Korea.

MapR Technologies Asia Pacific vice president Martin Darling told iTWire there was a "massive economic argument" for why businesses were choosing MapR and Hadoop over competing products.

"In terms of cost, when you look at the scale, and it's petabytes of data, the cost advantage of MapR and Hadoop is really around storage," Darling said in an interview yesterday.

"Rather than paying ten thousand dollars for external array, you're paying a thousand dollars a terabyte for local server storage, and we see that for our customers as around a 90% cost reduction compared to the traditional enterprise storage platforms.

"Storage consumption is growing by about 40% a year, and IT budgets are growing by about 2.5% per year. Ultimately something has to give here, and we think it's that financial pressure, that's one element that's pushing customers to adopt Hadoop. And I think the second thing is IT delivering much more actual business value, rather than just cost cutting, thanks to big data and new ways businesses can operate."

Darling said the company was expanding operations to support growing demand by Australian companies to use big data as a competitive weapon.

“Having Justin in Australia as country manager and establishing a growing Australian team on the ground means that we are now well equipped to assist our existing customers with their needs while capitalising on the demand for our products and services in this market," he said.

MapR already boasts Cisco, Blizzard Entertainment, HP, Samsung, LiveNation and the US government as its customers, among others, and said it was working hard to add Asian customers to the quickly growing list.

For more information on MapR check out its website here.