Cloudera is planning to boost its product portfolio with the acquisition of an artificial intelligence research firm.
The deal to acquire Fast Forward Labs should in theory help the Hadoop company to expand its machine learning offering.
Tom Reilly, Cloudera CEO, said that “Machine learning is an area of intense interest in every business,” that is capable of offering the ability to simplifying the view of data to acting upon it.
Read more: Cloudera IPO: An argument against open source business?
Whilst the technology is in high-demand, staying on top of the rapid pace of innovation in the machine learning and AI field can be tricky.
“Cloudera has a solution to help everyone stay up to speed on the rapidly evolving machine learning landscape with powerful insights and proven techniques.
“Today, I’m pleased to announce that Cloudera has acquired Fast Forward Labs, a top-tier applied research and advisory services company,” said Reilly.
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The company will now be known as Cloudera Fast Forward Labs, with the team said to be focused on practical research into “new approaches to data science and applying research to business problems that are broadly applicable to a variety of industries and applications,” said Reilly.
Read more: Hortonworks CEO Exclusive: De-risking Hadoop amid a new wave of data
From that, the Hadoop company says that it will benefit directly.
The acquisition was announced alongside the company’s financial results which saw it increase revenue by 39% year over year to $89.8m, which is mainly thanks to subscriptions – these grew by 46% to $73.9m.
Despite this, there’s still a significant operating loss of $65.7m, which has increased significantly from $38.5m for the same 2016 quarter.
Cloudera’s facing stiff competition in the big data Hadoop market, with Hortonworks piling on the pressure with collaboration deals with IBM.
