For any country to develop its infrastructure needs the strong presence of technology at the core and BI and Analytics is one of those technologies which needs to have careful choosing. Because it actually makes the entire infrastructure intelligent and smart.
India as a country sees growth all across the verticals with government (both central government and state governments) and PSUs leading the growth with investment on infrastructure development. Even government is encouraging local manufacturing and trying to make the business environment uniform by bringing in GST. Besides, there is a huge number of large enterprises into various vertical markets – be it Telco’s, Oil & Gas, transportation, healthcare, real estate, retail, hospitality and education – who are also trying to adoption digitization and investing in data centre modernization. There are also millions of SMES who are investing in technologies to become competitive.
So when all these developments happening, there is a huge amount data flow happening through their networks and the organizations who are trying to understand those data and analyze those are becoming more relevant to the customers. The exercise is actually making those organizations smart and allowing them to service their customers quite efficiently. But the challenge is that there is not a good number of data professionals in the market who could help these organization – be it government or enterprises – to understand the relevance of the data coming to their networks.
Daniel Ng, the Senior Director for the APAC region of the Hadoop based Big Data company Cloudera, says, “All business today runs on data. Most countries would invite investments by giving tax incentives. It is good if you are the only country giving that but if every country is offering the same, it is not good. So we understand from the countries that before there is any investment comes in, the investors are asking about if there is enough data professional available in the country. And this is also applicable to India.”
“Therefore, we have launched an initiative in India called ‘BASE’ which stands for Big Analytics Skill Enablement. This is to work with government to develop more data professionals for the country,” he added.
As per Daniel, the situation today is that the market awareness has gone from ‘What is Big Data’ to ‘Why is Big Data’ to ‘How we use Big Data’. But the big challenge today is that there is not enough data processionals in the market place, which impedes the progress of Big Data Analytics for the country as well as it impedes the investment inflow into the country.
Today, Cloudera has customers like Airtel and Tata Sky among others. These companies are continuously looking for data professionals to run their business. However, Cloudera does not have enough processionals to help them do that. So the country like India has to produce its own data professionals in order to help the organizations. So BASE initiative is designed to work with countries like India to produce more of these professionals.
BASE has many components. The first piece of this initiative is Cloudera Academic Partnership (CAP). CAP allows the companies to tie up with the universities and tertiary institutes. Every tertiary education institute needs to provide education on big data and analytics but they are not doing that today because their lecturers are not equipped to teach. And, there is no curriculum to enable their teachers.
Daniel added, “In our survey they need five years to train teachers and develop curriculum and need another two years to develop first batch of their students. What we offer them is first, curriculum for their students free of charge, second, curriculum for the teachers to teach, third, up to 50% discount on training the teachers and fourth, providing enterprise software for their practice.
“So universities and tertiary educations really love these because, now they need only two years instead of seven years to develop first batch of their students because they do not need anything. We already have three such institutes who have agreed to be part of the CAP programme,” he added.
Post the certification, the students would definitely need internship because it is a practical science. So Cloudera has developed an internship programme, which allows the universities to supply interns to various companies so that they could have the experiences. In turn, these company will be able to look for hiring the best student before they go anywhere else. This is one way of progressing the data professional piece.
What is also important to know that the students coming out of CAP programme are best fitted to the position of data administrator or data analyst. In order to give them job opportunity the company also has executive search firm.
Daniel maintains, “But there are some who would like to pursue further and they would like to be data scientist, so where they would get the courses who would give them the advancements. Here the programme would link the training partners to take these young professionals to the next level.”
When this happens, the students are linked to the executive search firm for jobs. Daniel added, “In this juncture, most governments would say that even two years is too long. We want them immediately. Therefore, the fifth piece comes into play which is the community. India a very rich country with a lot of ICT professional.
For example, there are a lot of Microsoft certified professionals in India. This is good and bad at the same time because when you need for employees 995 applicants would disappoint you because they do not have the skillsets on Big Data. These people can upgrade to Big Data analytics and do certification. These people are the bright future for the country because companies like Micros, AWS, Red Hat, etc. are all going through Big Data Analytics. So why would not they be prepare for the future with additional certification. There is a survey in the US that a certified Big Data Analytics professional who earns nearly half a million USD per year as package, because there is such a high demand with very low supply. That is what we are experiencing here in India.
So when the community participates, the data professionals could be produced in a shortest possible time frame. This actually along with CAP programme would bridge the gap of data professional’s shortage in the market.
To us Government plays critical role in three areas including programme, policies and incentives. Different countries have done it differently. So it is up to the government of India to create its strategy.
The last piece is obviously the end user organizations at the end of the day, even though they like the price point and the per user consumption model, but if there is a shortage of data professionals, then the technology is only a piece of technology. So what we are seeing with the production of data professionals in the market place, it would accelerate the adoption of Big Data and analytics in India.
Finally…
The entire BASE initiative may have a hidden goal of creating a strong customer mindshare, but it certainly helps the country to overcome the data professional paucity. Specially for the governments which are scouting for investment in various industrial areas in order to absorb their young population and achieve strong economy growth for years to come.
