Cloudera Brings Hadoop to School

This week Hadoop-based data management software giant, Cloudera, announced a new program aimed at providing in-depth Hadoop training and certification. Dubbed “Cloudera University” the education initiative will blaze new trails in providing a structured learning program for developers and system administrators.

This is not a new move for Cloudera, who first began training developers and sys admins back in 2009. Cloudera officials say that even before the launch of Cloudera University they have churned out over 7,000 graduates of their learning and certification program. They claim that one of the reasons for the broader Cloudera University education program is the huge uptick in demand for their courses.

According to Cloudera’s release on the topic, those signing up for Hadoop classes will boom through 2011. They claim they expect that their ranks of students will grow to include both student and enterprise learners to the tune of over 4,000 this year alone. They expect this number to double by the close of 2012.

Before the official launch of Cloudera University, the company held private and public training courses that were enterprise use case-based. The goal was to provide realistic examples to implement knowledge shared about Hadoop and the ecosystem around it (Hive, Pig, and HBase, specifically). “Graduates” of the Cloudera training programs could become Cloudera Certified Developers for Apache Hadoop (CCDH) and Cloudera Certified Administrators for Apache Hadoop (CCAH). These certifications have become well-recognized in industry with many Hadoop-related job postings referring to these credentials directly.

The courses are not limited to the West; Cloudera says their 2011 schedule branches out to 25 countries and that their overall training program will grow as well, bringing in new certification programs for the “entire spectrum of Hadoop-related technologies.”

James Fitch, a consulting software engineer with OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. says that the certification allowed him to validate both the technology and his proficiency when he approached management with Hadoop. He said this was particularly important because with a large, established company “it’s often difficult to get buy-in when proposing moving to a new technology.”

Others, including Rami Muktar, a researcher with NICTA say that the benefit of the courses was about finding confidence to approach new Hadoop projects—and giving others the confidence that he was skilled enough to tackle Hadoop challenges.

According to Maria Deutsche from Silicon Angle, The Cloudera Connect Partner Program, as it’s called, is an all-inclusive suite that includes the industry’s first Hadoop certification program for third party hardware and software, in addition to sales material, case studies and training among other things. Cloudera doesn’t plan on banking on the relatively new program directly but is rather considering it as an investment to expand its partner and client base.”

As a “real” university, Cloudera needs to set about choosing a mascot. The question is, would it be too obvious to select a giant stuffed elephant?