The rule of thumb in the Hadoop ecosystem is that the newer a technology is, the fewer people possess the necessary skills to exploit it. Apache Spark, an emerging data crunching engine for the batch processing framework described by its backers as orders-of-magnitude faster than the current standard, is no exception. As a result, the benefits  offered by the project are beyond the reach of the majority of organizations that do not possess the in-house talent needed to implement it in their environments.

Cloudera sees education as the means of changing that. The Hadoop distributor is rolling out a new program meant to prepare enterprise developers on how to create applications that can fully take advantage of the speed improvements offered by Spark. The three-day course starts with the fundamentals, familiarizing participants with the capabilities available at their disposal, and continues to more advanced topics such as how to process real-time data and create specialized apps using the technology.

While Cloudera is working to help organizations educate existing workers in how to harness analytics, rival Hortonworks is promising to save the hassle  altogether through a new partnership with Accenture. Under the agreement, the consultancy giant will provide joint customers with assistance in integrating Hadoop into their existing infrastructure, a requirement that Wikibon sees as key to continued enterprise adoption of the platform.

Tableau is taking a different approach to bridging the Big Data skills gap. Instead of trying to cultivate more specialized talent that will end up taking up more of IT organizations’ already tight budgets, the company puts analytics directly into the hands of business users with its visualization software. Seeing the value in that proposition, InfiniDB, the company behind the Hadoop-connected columnar database of the same name, has integrated its platform with Tableau in order to provide support for interactive reporting and ad-hoc analysis.

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