Cloudera, arguably the first company to release a paid distribution of tools for Hadoop, plans to open an Australian office on the back of sales leads from vendor partners such as Oracle, Dell, NetApp and Teradata.
Hadoop refers to an open source file distribution system and job scheduler that distributes data analysis jobs over infinitely large numbers of small servers to process data-intensive queries at high speed.
Based on technology that revolutionised Google search and numerous applications for Yahoo and Facebook, Hadoop is available free under the Apache open source license, but has also found its way into the enterprise via paid, supported distributions.
Distributions - such as those offered by Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR - bundle Hadoop with management and administration consoles powered by a graphical user interface, monitoring tools, query tools for data analysis, workflow engines and a wealth of other applications that extend the base platform.
Mike Olsen, co-founder of Cloudera and currently the company’s chief strategy officer, visited Australia to talk to joint customers of Cloudera and Oracle and told iTnews he was on the hunt for suitable personnel.
“We are opening our AsiaPac headquarters in Australia, and bringing on a collection of support and technical field personnel worthy of the opportunity.”
“We’ve been conspicuously absent from the region,” he said. “A lot of folks here have been downloading the software, and we’ve closed and serviced a lot of deals from out of the US.”
Competitor Hortonworks has no local presence outside of vendor partners. MapR has already open a Sydney sales office and works closely with local trainer Contexti. Its regional headquarters are based in Singapore.
“We will be increasing our presence in the region over the next few months,” a MapR spokesman told iTnews.
Olsen said he chose Australia as the centre of Cloudera’s APAC efforts because the “language is easy, and the business culture, legal and financial infrastructure is the right fit”.
He conceded that Australia was at least 18 months behind the US in terms of Hadoop skills and deployments but expected “that will be fixed in short order”.
“It took us five years to build our business in the US - it won’t take nearly as long for skills and experience to develop in Australia because of the IP we’ve created already.”
Stay tuned for HADOOP WEEK!!!, coming soon to iTnews.
