Jack Norris, MapR, at BigDataSV 2014 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante @thecube #BigDataSV MapR last week expanded its presence in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region with the opening of an office in Seoul meant to serve as a platform for addressing the accelerating adoption of Big Data among South Korea’s largest companies. The move comes five months after the Hadoop distributor arrived in Japan, and marks the latest milestone in CEO John Schroeder’s plan for an eventual public offering. The MapR strategy centers on what chief marketing officer Jack Norris described in an interview as a “proven business model of really focusing on a product, selling a product, making a product enterprise grade, utilizing the innovations of the community but providing some [additional] advantages so customers can be even more successful.” By combining proprietary technology with the core open source components of Hadoop, the company has been able to differentiate on enterprise functionality and gain ground against rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks, which are pursuing more community-centric approaches. MapR’s newly established Seoul branch is headed by country manager Daniel Kim, who brings nearly two decades of industry experience to the firm and had previously served in similar roles with QLogic Korea, DataDirect Networks and disk-based backup specialist Copan Systems. He also worked for EMC, NetApp and Dacom, best known as the maker of the first commercial fax machine. “With the most advanced big data enterprise platform for Hadoop, we are confident that MapR will lead the big data market in Korea,” Kim said in a prepared statement. “We plan to grow the Korean market and meet emerging enterprise needs in collaboration with partners this year.” MapR has teamed with LG to provide integration and consulting services for its distro, which Kim noted is already used by Samsung and a “significant life insurance company.”