Cloudera, a U.S. provider of open-source software based on Hadoop, has opened a subsidiary in Japan, where local firms are increasingly using the platform to handle their exploding data stores.
The California-based firm said Wednesday it has partnered with NTT Data, one of the country's largest IT companies, and will work with software vendor NS Solutions as a local reseller.
Cloudera arrives in Japan as the country's technology giants are rolling out their products for working with "big data," an industry buzzword that refers to the huge sets of information generated by the growing number of websites, social networks, and physical networks of sensors and other devices. Local firms are also adopting the practice of replacing expensive centralized servers with armadas of commodity servers in large data centers.
The company provides software based on Hadoop, an open-source platform for processing large sets of data and designed to run distributed over many machines. It mainly provides its software free of charge, then sells support and training, similar to companies like Linux provider Red Hat.
Earlier this week, Fujitsu announced a new suite of software for handling big data, including a server that expands upon Hadoop. The company said it eventually targets ¥100 billion (US$1.23 billion) in annual sales.
Localized Hadoop training is a key need in Japan, where a lack of trained engineers and language barriers are often cited as major hurdles to the spread of the platform.
Hadoop is a project of the Apache Software Foundation and reached version 1.0 in January of this year.
Cloudera was founded in 2008. It employs Doug Cutting, a founder of Hadoop, which he named after his son's toy elephant. The company secured $40 million in Series D funding last year and lists Groupon, Nokia and Samsung as customers.
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