Cloudera establishes China base to head up Hadoop’s next revolution
Intel-backed Hadoop vendor Cloudera Inc. is hoping to export the Big Data craze to China with the opening of three offices in the country, its just announced.
Cloudera already has a small Asian presence thanks to its offices in Japan, but the opening of facilities in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai suggests it has far bigger ambitions.
“We are making a big investment in a big opportunity,” said Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly in a statement. “With the interest in open source software and big data being so strong, we expect fast growth and adoption in China.”
Cloudera says the aim is to provide Chinese companies with the technology they need to build data hubs with Apache Hadoop, the popular Big Data analytics software that stores and distributes large data sets. The company has already made a brief foray into the Chinese market, offering services and training to support the growth of China’s nascent Big Data market, and claims to have trained more than 27,000 people around the world in how to use Hadoop.
“Our new presence gives us an opportunity to innovate locally, to better collaborate with our enterprise customers and to show strong support for our local China partners,” added Reilly.
Reilly’s confidence in Big Data’s potential in China certainly isn’t unfounded. Meng Su, associate professor of marketing at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, predicted last year that “China will soon become world’s most important data market.”
Considering China’s size, it’s a claim that may have some merit. The world’s most populous nation of 1.3 billion people possesses a rapidly expanding urban economy, plus rising rates of Internet and smartphone penetration. In other words, China generates a massive amount of data – and very soon Chinese businesses are going to want to sift through and analyze that data in order to get insights on the nation’s sometimes fickle consumers, just as American companies are already doing.
One of China’s best known Internet companies, Alibaba Group Holding Limited, has already made moves in this direction. In 2012 it announced plans to focus on “three pillars”, namely ecommerce, finance and data mining, and since then it’s gone and created a special data-platform division with around 800 employees.
Cloudera is clearly hopeful that Chinese firms, like many of their US counterparts, will want to use the Hadoop platform as their main tool for understanding the rising amounts of data they’re gobbling up.
“With a strong economy, successful enterprises and local developers, China is a place for great products and services powered by Big Data technologies like Cloudera,” said George Ling, general manager, Cloudera China. “The new China offices give us an opportunity to showcase our local talent in an important and savvy market, with the ability to address changes in the local economy with sensitivity to cultural dynamics ultimately ensuring our customers’ success.”
photo credit: andydoro via photopin cc
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