News

Cloudera Teams with CenturyLink for Big Data-as-a-Service

• By David Ramel
• September 23, 2016

Cloudera Inc. has teamed up with communications company CenturyLink to provide its Apache Hadoop-based Big Data analytics software as a service.

"CenturyLink's Global IT Services is delivering a fully managed Big Data solution powered by Cloudera Enterprise," the companies announced yesterday. "This combined Big Data offering will exponentially speed time to deploy Cloudera Enterprise and also simplify some of the management complexities from Hadoop operations, so that customers can spend more time working with data and generating new insights that drive business growth."

Cloudera offers one of the industry's more popular Hadoop-based distributions, along with companies such as Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc. Cloudera Enterprise combines the company's open source Hadoop-based platform with system management tools, dedicated support and community advocacy services.

The companies said that by providing Cloudera Enterprise as a Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) offering, CenturyLink will be able to integrate existing data sources and ingest real-time data to provide a more complete view of customers that use its various systems, products and interaction channels. The company will also use the Cloudera platform to conduct advanced analytics projects for initiatives such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). That reportedly will enable the company to proactively monitor and optimize its communications network.

"CenturyLink and Cloudera have a history of outstanding customer service and innovation, and we're pleased to be helping deliver a data management and analytics platform that drives significant business benefits," said Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly said in a statement yesterday. "CenturyLink's Big Data-as-a-Service offerings will make concepts like advanced analytics, machine learning and real-time data more available and accessible to more people. And that's where true business transformation happens."

The CenturyLink BDaaS offering is currently under development, expected to become generally available later this year.