MapR to partner education firms to churn out data scientists

It is in talks with 'a couple of education service providers in the country to launch the Hadoop certification programme'

Silicon Valley firm MapR, a provider of Apache Hadoop technology that is used in storage and large-scale processing of data sets, plans to roll out an education programme for churning out industry-ready data scientists in India.

According to software services body Nasscom, while there are around 15,000 big data and analytics experts in the country, there will be a dearth of around 200,000 data scientists over the next few years.

MapR, which has a development centre in Hyderabad outside the US, is in talks with “a couple of education service providers in the country to launch the Hadoop certification programme.” MapR’s partner ecosystem includes Cisco, Google, TCS, HP, and Amazon Web Services.

“We are planning to launch the programme across four centres, including Hyderabad and Bangalore. We would be skilling the trainers under it,” said Shankar Murukutla, regional sales director for MapR Technologies, Inc in South Asia.

Murukutla added a majority of people having working knowledge on Hadoop were from India and the rest of the world lacked skills in it. According to him, it is a lucrative field as data scientists earn double the salary of an IT professional and “most of them were employed with Google Inc”. He said Google Inc had invested $90-100 million in the company’s last round of investment.

Earlier this year, at the Nasscom Big Data and Analytics Summit, Srikanth Velamakanni, member of the Analytics Interest Group, said it was working with the industry and academic institutes on how to groom talent pool in this field. Industry estimates pegged the Indian analytics market at $2 billion by 2018, up from about $1 billion in the last fiscal.

In India, MapR plans to associate with application developers working on the Hadoop platform. It is looking to engage tech graduates, who can also register their products in its app gallery for access to global clients.

The company is betting big on demand arising from the government sector in India. "Government is the largest source of data across the world and any service from them would be a big opportunity for us," said Murukutla.