Cloudera Enterprise inks international IMS Health contract

Global information and technology services firm IMS Health as selected data management and analytics company Cloudera to support its Big Data Factory for life sciences and healthcare.

IMS Health has offices all over the world, including two in Australia and one in New Zealand.

Its Big Data Factory is a cloud-based platform that transforms data into intelligence for life sciences and healthcare clients.

The company says the collaboration with Cloudera aims to accelerate and enhance data acquisition, processing and warehousing in the factory.

"As IMS Health continues to innovate with Big Data, Cloudera will advance our efforts to build and provision breakthrough data processing and data warehousing solutions," explains Karl Guenault, chief information officer and vice president of Operations, IMS Health.

"We're excited to apply Hadoop and other open source technologies for integrating, processing and interpreting more extensive and granular data – helping our customers drive healthcare performance," he says.

Shawn Dolley, Cloudera industry leader for Health and Life Sciences, says, "The insight that IMS Health will gain through the platform can ultimately be measured in better patient outcomes, and Cloudera is thrilled to work with them on this endeavour.

"As the leading provider of open source Hadoop solutions, Cloudera and IMS Health are uniquely positioned to support the growing needs of healthcare organisations looking to optimise their data utilisation and provide better care," he says.

The combined solution will support:

• Next-generation data processing. Cloudera's latest open source technology platforms support machine learning – which uses cognitive systems to automate quality control, data bridging and modeling, and other repetitive tasks—to drive evidence-based decisions for clients. Using the Hadoop cluster technology, IMS Health can extract, store and analyse vast quantities of unstructured data for generating new, more comprehensive insights for customers.

• Accelerated time to insight. The IMS Health Big Data Factory will harness Hadoop's parallel processing technology to streamline data acquisition and management, delivering powerful insights with higher efficiency.

• Scalable data management. The Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) eliminates data transfer bottlenecks, storage capacity delays and time spent adding new servers to augment traditional data clusters – enabling IMS Health to improve the speed and scalability of Big Data management.