Linux Foundation Announces New Conference to Support Collaboration Among Open Source Big Data Communities

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 28, 2015) - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced Apache: Big Data, a new event that brings together leading committers of Apache Big Data projects to advance the technologies driving the way we capture, assess and store the plethora of data in the world today.

The first Apache: Big Data event will be held in Budapest, September 28 - 30, and takes the place of the former ApacheCon event. A new co-located event called ApacheCon: Core, taking place October 1-2, will host select Apache projects in a mix of self-organized tracks and mini-summits, as well as a Web Technologies track, Incubator & Innovation track, and Community track.

More industries and companies than ever, from marketing and finance to healthcare and government, are using Big Data to inform business decisions and create new products and services. This is resulting in an explosion of new open technologies to accelerate the use of Big Data and new job opportunities for data scientists and programmers.

Apache: Big Data will gather together the Apache projects, people and technologies working on big data, ubiquitous computing and data engineering and science to educate, collaborate and connect in a completely project-neutral environment. It is the only event that brings together the full suite of big data open source projects under one roof.

Virtually all of the leading big data projects including Bigtop, Crunch, Falcon, Flink, Hadoop, Kafka, Parquet, Phoenix, Samza, Spark, Storm, Tajo and others are developed under the auspices of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF and The Linux Foundation have joined forces to produce Apache: Big Data to bring the power of these projects together under one roof where the developers and maintainers of the projects can work with users and collaborate with each other to accelerate the state of the art.

Sessions at Apache: Big Data will be selected by an impartial program committee consisting of the following members:

• Doug Cutting: Creator of Apache Hadoop, Apache Lucene, Co-creator of Apache Nutch, Chief Architect at Cloudera
• Owen O'Malley: Founding Chair of the Apache Hadoop Project Management Committee, Co-Founder of Hortonworks
• Roman Shaposhnik: Apache Bigtop Founder, Director of Open Source at Pivotal
• Reynold Xin: Apache Spark Project Management Committee Member, Co-founder of Databricks

"Big Data continues to grow in importance, as both data volumes and processing power increase," said Amanda McPherson, CMO and VP Developer Programs at The Linux Foundation. "Apache Software Foundation projects like Hadoop, Spark and Storm are the building blocks of big data infrastructure. Apache: Big Data will bring the developers and committers of these and other projects together with sophisticated end users who want to make the most of them."