Qubole Helps Big Data Find a Home in Education Vertical

Education giant Pearson has joined the big-data movement by partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner Qubole.

Ashish Thusoo, CEO of Qubole, a big data-as-a-service provider, says his company’s new partnership with Pearson is another example of “cloud getting pulled into the enterprises.”

“More and more enterprises are now very comfortable with using the cloud, and that is why we are seeing companies like Pearson adopt Qubole’s platform,” he said.

Pearson, which is well known for its educational assessments and publishing, is making a “data lake” that its data scientists will use to drive insights. Pearson is rolling out a product set that employs predictive analytics for teachers to measure their students’ progress and weaknesses.

“This use case is a great example of how big data can be used in transforming existing business,” Thusoo said.

Although Thusoo said the education sector hasn’t necessarily been known for pursuing big data, he said phenomena like proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) are making it more attractive.

“I think big data has the ability to touch any sector [that] is consumer-focused or device-focused, because both of those dimensions lead to the creation of large amounts of data,” he said.

Sumit Arora, a Pearson lead big-data architect, said in a news release that Pearson picked Qubole’s solution for its authentication, authorization, auditing, monitoring and auto-scaling capabilities.

“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,” Arora said. “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.”

Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma founded Qubole after leading big-data efforts at Facebook. Thusoo says his company’s relationship with AWS is growing and that the partnership with Pearson is “essentially a verification of how people can find an enterprise-grade experience around big data using the cloud.”