The primary focus has been to make MapR more open to community with changes around Open Data Access, Open Monitoring and Management and release of its source code for powerful various components within the distribution.

The recent release includes a fully compliant ODBC 3.52 (Open Database Connectivity) driver as part of its Hadoop Distribution allowing users to leverage hundreds of commercial and open source SQL-based tools, such as query builders and BI applications including Excel, Tableau, MicroStrategy and a variety of 100% open source SQL tools and many others.

A full support to variety of authentication modules including Linux PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules), LDAP, Active Directory along with open integrations to system management tools and dashboards like Nagios and Ganglia including openosurce and commercial 3rd party tools.

One of 4 big data companies to watch in 2012, MapR has claimed giving freedom to its community to make changes to all such components enjoying the reliability, availability and performance of the underlying MapR storage and compute framework. Tomer Shiran, director of product management has said "Unlike other Hadoop distributions, there is no need to deploy agents or specialized connectors to get data into and out of a Hadoop cluster. MapR opens up Hadoop by allowing users to leverage a broad array of standard commands, tools and applications.”