A U.S. company, and one that is pioneering the area of
big data, announced earlier in December that their European expansion plans
which include headquarters in the UK. Cloudera confirmed long-standing rumours
that they would be opening UK operations through last week's announcement. The
company raised some USD $65 million in its latest round of fundraising, some of
which will go to get the UK operations up and running.
Cloudera is a three-year-old company specialising in
Apache Hadoop, an open source framework making it possible to run data
intensive applications with greater reliability and stability. The framework
has been an instrumental tool in developing big data technologies and faster
data communications.
The idea of big data is one of analysing and crunching
very large data sets that cannot be practically handled by traditional desktop
solutions and Internet hosting options. Big data requires faster and more
powerful analytical tools and, more importantly, a robust cloud environment
able to make use of data across thousands of servers. It also requires data
centres capable of hosting high-powered analytical software.
With Cloudera's announcement out of the way, the rumour
mill now turns to fellow big data companies MapR and Hortonworks. Even though
MapR made their own announcement about a future London office last week, there
is still a lot of speculation as to where that will lead.
It also remains to be seen how many jobs the three
companies will generate once their facilities open. All three will obviously be
competing to expand their European footprints and increase market share, but
the level of talent they're able to secure in doing so will go a long way to
determining each one's market position.
For now, it would seem as though Cloudera has the
competitive edge. They have already worked out a partnership with Oracle to
create the Oracle Big Data Appliance, a scalable system for massive data
analysis within the Apache Hadoop environment. The company has also launched its
own Project Impala high-speed, real-time query engine.
Big Data Biggest
Winner
From our perspective, the big winner here is big data.
The whole concept of big data was predicated on the fact that our increasingly
mobile world adds new data to the Internet with every passing minute. Moreover,
in a world where data analysis drives marketing, research and development, and
future business plans, the ability to work with such large amounts of data is
now highly critical.
Of particular interest is the idea of big data in
virtualisation. Big data is almost custom-made for the cloud, with its ability
to handle data from thousands of different points, and seems right at home with
virtualisation. The technology comes at a very important time in Europe, a time
when governments are really pushing hard to force the European cloud to catch
up with the States. It seems the arrival of these three companies will only
serve to accelerate that push. It should also result in more European companies
migrating to the cloud.
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