+1 more for East London’s Tech City cluster: big data company Cloudera has announced the opening of its EMEA HQ on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. In late 2010, the U.K. coalition government created the Tech City label to slap on an existing, organic startup hub — promising equity finance for businesses with high growth potential and money for tech & innovation centres. It also encouraged big name tech companies to open offices and workspaces in the area, including Facebook and Google.
Today there are apparently more than 1,300 high tech companies based in ‘Silicon Roundabout’, and Cloudera said the pool of available tech talent influenced its decision to base its European HQ in Tech City.
“Headquartering Cloudera’s EMEA operations in London, at the heart of its technology cluster, will enable us to develop closer ties with key customer and partner organizations, and gives us access to a diverse and highly skilled pool of database architects and data scientists,” said Ross Hinchcliffe, vice president of EMEA at Cloudera in a statement.
Cloudera’s newly appointed VP of EMEA Ross Hinchcliffe — previously European operations lead for Tealeaf, an IBM acquisition target last year — will lead the new division. Cloudera said the Tech City offices will support its expansion into “key European markets” by providing “on-the-ground resources to deliver technical support, training and solution development for its enterprise customers and partners in the EMEA region”.
Rising enterprise demand for Apache Hadoop apparently spurred Cloudera’s decision to open a European base. In the past year it said it has seen “dramatically increased momentum” in interest/adoption of its Apache Hadoop-based software, training and support services from data-driven enterprises across Europe and global enterprise customers with broad operational footprints in Europe — name-checking the likes of BlackBerry, CBS Interactive, eBay, Expedia, Experian, JP Morgan Chase, King.com, Monsanto, Morgan Stanley and Nokia.