Integrators jump on Cloudera's big data bandwagon

Global systems integrator Capgemini has forged a worldwide strategic partnership with Cloudera, which is considered one of the market leaders in enterprise data management and big data analytics solutions powered by the Apache Hadoop platform. (See Andrew Brust's Oct. 29, 2013, report from the Strata + Hadoop conference last week in New York for more on Cloudera's latest product developments.)

Capgemini actually started building up its Cloudera knowledge two years ago. The deal just formalizes the sorts of services that the two will bring into enterprise accounts through the integrator's 8,000-consultant business information management practice.

"Together with Cloudera, we help organizations optimize their current technology investments, exploit massive data volumes and new data types, achieving true insight and forward vision to improve operational efficiency," said Scott Schlesinger, senior vice president of Business Information Management, North America, for Capgemini.

Specifically, Cloudera will be part of Capgemini's Big Data Service Center, responsible for designing, delivering and supporting Big Data solutions. The framework includes consulting to align information strategy to business decisions, a business intelligence and data warehouse assessment, solution designs that build on existing infrastructure, expert technical resources to help manage the deployment, and help in defining the sorts of information that provide a company with the best competitive advantage.

The Capgemini alliance is just one in a smattering of relationships with influential cloud integration and migration solution providers that Cloudera has forged recently in an effort to support deployments of its platform in public cloud environments. Other new partners, which became charter members of the new Cloudera Connect: Cloud program late last month, are Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Savvis (the CenturyLink cloud service company), SoftLayer (part of IBM) and T-Systems.

"We remain committed to solving higher order big data problems for our customers that will enable them to ask bigger questions and derive more sophisticated insights from their data -- wherever it lives -- from a single, unified enterprise data management platform," said Tim Stevens, vice president, corporate and business development, Cloudera.