Hortonworks is ‘significantly' expanding its Australian operations in an effort to drive adoption of enterprise Apache Hadoop throughout Asia Pacific.

The Hadoop specialist is establishing a regional support centre in Sydney and adding senior sales and technical staff in what it says is a response to growing demand for solutions around big data.

Andy Leaver, Hortonworks international vice president, says Australia and Asia Pacific are a key focus for Hortonworks moving forward as a growing number of organisations in the region seek help understanding what big data is and then taking action to uncover value from that data.

“Hadoop is one of the most important and disruptive technology platforms to emerge in enterprise IT over the past several years,” Leaver says.

“It provides both the technology and vibrant developer community to support cost-effective and efficient management of massive data sets while helping organisations extract intelligence from them.

Leaver says Australia businesses across key verticals including financial services, telecommunications, retail, manufacturing and mining are all grappling with ‘exponential' increases in data. That means companies are looking for new solutions to help them optimse IT spend, while creating new analytic applications for deeper insight into their business.

The Sydney-based Asia Pacific regional support centre adds to existing hubs in the United States, United Kingdom and India and will help provide 24/7 support for customers worldwide ‘but especially those in Australia and throughout APAC', Hortonworks says.

The company says a key goal for the expanded team in Australia will be to help partners, including independent software vendors and system integrator, help organisations take advantage of their big data.