MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 29, 2015) - Qubole, the big data-as-a-service company founded by the team that developed Facebook's data infrastructure, today announced that Pearson, one of the world's leading learning companies, has deployed Qubole's platform running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) across its personalized learning analytics (PLA) department to unlock valuable insights from its higher education products. Additionally, Qubole announced its achievement of the AWS Partner Network (APN) Big Data Competency, building on its status as an Advanced Technology Partner in the APN.
Pearson's educational products streamline online learning, allowing students to submit assignments, review course content, view grades and more. To effectively manage the streams of data from these products, Pearson is launching an initiative to build a data lake for housing a wide range of data, such as product activity to operational data, including sales/registrations and survey results. It will act as a research environment for data scientists and analysts to query, investigate and mine the information in one location. Additionally, it will enable organizational reporting for business intelligence, product efficacy analytics and content analytics.
Pearson selected Spark SQL as the execution engine, with Apache Parquet as the underlying file format for its data lake. Because Qubole's solution has the flexibility to provide access to a variety of Hadoop engines and open-source tools, such as Spark SQL and Parquet, Pearson will use the Qubole Data Service platform to build its production applications.
Pearson's PLA is now developing a new generation of products that use predictive analytics to give teachers deep insight into their students' progress. It can alert instructors of the likelihood a student will pass or fail, and identify whether students are struggling with a particular lesson. It can then take corrective measures automatically, such as generating more practice questions around the problem area. Qubole's big data-as-a-service platform on AWS enables Pearson to manage and process the massive amounts of data the new products generate.
"We ultimately selected Qubole's solution because it offers authentication, authorization, auditing, monitoring and auto-scaling capabilities out of the box," said Sumit Arora, lead big data architect, Pearson. "Because AWS has a great support model and offers several options of different technologies, Pearson is able to take advantage of the flexibility of AWS depending on the task at hand. Add to that, the ability to deploy Qubole on top of AWS provides additional value to Pearson without having to invest in additional engineering resources."
Based on the success customers like Pearson and others are seeing using Qubole on AWS, Qubole achieved the APN Big Data Competency for helping customers evaluate and use the tools, techniques and technologies of working with data productively, at any scale.
"We continue to experience strong momentum in the AWS Cloud market, helping an expanding customer base experience the benefits of big data in the cloud," said Ashish Thusoo, CEO and co-founder, Qubole. "We're proud to say that our relationship with AWS has only strengthened and we're honored that Qubole is a featured Big Data solution for Advanced Analytics on AWS."
Qubole will be showcasing its platform in booth #125 at AWS re:Invent, which takes place next week at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada.
About Qubole
Qubole is a big data-as-a-service company that provides a fast, easy and reliable path to turn big data into valuable business insights. Qubole's cloud-based platform addresses the challenges of processing huge volumes of structured and unstructured data. It uses clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Google Compute and Microsoft Azure to help enterprises put big data processing in the hands of their users while enabling their operations teams to be nimble and adaptive to their users' needs. Qubole achieves this through features such as auto-scaled big data clusters and integrated tool sets for data analysts, developers and business users. With more than 100 PB of data processed every month across its customer base, Qubole's platform makes enterprises agile with big data.