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November 19, 2014

Qubole’s Big Data as a Service Now Available on Microsoft Azure Cloud

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.,  Nov. 19 — Qubole, a leading provider of Big Data in the cloud, is pleased to announce that Microsoft Azure customers can now leverage the Qubole Data Service (QDS) to programmatically provision Azure cloud services, removing the unknowns of what infrastructure resources and costs are required for Big Data.

QDS, the only auto-scaling Hadoop engine to run on Microsoft Azure, makes the most efficient use of infrastructure while providing an easy to use interface for managing jobs. Delivered as a service, QDS shortens the time to value of Big Data and requires no upfront investment: users pay only for what they use and the system self-manages the clusters to their job specifications.

Qubole will be available on Microsoft Azure through an Early Adopter Program and will provide organizations with greater flexibility, choice and control in their delivery of Big Data insights.

“The Qubole Data Service is a pure-cloud solution that runs at enterprise scale, processing 80+ petabytes of data every month across our client base. With cloud-based Hadoop clusters as large as 1,500 nodes, Qubole manages some of the largest Hadoop clusters ever brought up in the cloud,” said Ashish Thusoo, CEO and co-founder of Qubole and author of Apache.

Qubole QDS is a 100 percent Apache Hadoop compatible solution and presents an opportunity for solution providers in the Microsoft Partner Network to deliver a premium Big Data service on Azure to their customers. Solution providers with experience in Azure, BI and SQL Server have demonstrated strong interest in Qubole’s Azure Early Adopter Program, and Qubole is offering complimentary online training to Microsoft Partner Network members with these competencies.

Qubole’s Big Data as a Service enables enterprises to provide users with widespread accessibility to Big Data interfaces and tools, including MapReduce, Hive, Pig, Presto, Sqoop and more. At the same time, Qubole’s self-managed and auto-scaled Hadoop infrastructure enables enterprises to achieve this ubiquitous access with a very small operational footprint.

“Qubole’s offering on Azure delivers an option for cloud-based Hadoop as a Service,” said Thusoo. “We deliver a data platform that leverages the Azure Object store instead of HDFS, providing ubiquitous data access at high performance and scale while at a fraction of a cost compared to HDFS-based solutions. We will continue to work with the Azure team to build out further integrations with additional Azure services like security, traditional Microsoft BI tools and Azure Machine Learning.”

XCentium, a Qubole partner and a Microsoft certified solution provider, helps organizations leverage Big Data to drive growth. “We partnered with Qubole to deliver a premium Hadoop offering to our customer base. Microsoft-centric companies constantly look for ways to leverage the TCO benefits of Azure. Big Data is the perfect use case for Azure and dramatically accelerates the time to value of a project while eliminating the overhead of managing Hadoop infrastructure,” said Steve Miller, Managing Partner at XCentium, a Microsoft Solutions Provider for Business Intelligence.

“We are thrilled to have Qubole’s Big Data as a Service offering on Azure, empowering our customers with an open source solution built on Azure’s scalability and durability. Qubole complements our wide range of Big Data offerings from Azure’s HDInsight (Hadoop) and Machine Learning services, as well as our Cloud BI services like Power BI for Office 365,” said Mike Schutz, General Manager of Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure.

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