Big Data Partnership, the big data services company, has announced an expansion of its curriculum and a partnership with Databricks to offer Europe's first Apache Spark training programme.

Big Data Partnership provides vendor-agnostic big data consulting, training and support for diverse industries including web, financial services, telecoms, utilities, defence and media. Its extensive client list boasts several leading Fortune 500 companies. Big Data Partnership offers a unique breadth of knowledge of open source big data technologies, which is reflected in its wide range of partners. This enables it to offer training and assistance to IT professionals who need to learn about and exploit these technologies.

Mike Merritt-Holmes, CEO and cofounder of Big Data Partnership, comments: "While Apache Spark is a relatively new open source solution, its powerful real time capabilities, ease of use and rich functionality – including stream processing, machine learning, and graph computations – are quickly making it a leading processing engine for Hadoop data. We are thrilled to offer training to the European market for this important framework."

Mike Ferguson, managing director of Intelligent Business Solutions, comments: "Big Data Partnership's announcement to offer Databricks certified Spark training in Europe will no doubt be welcomed by Hadoop customers seeking to exploit scalable in-memory analytics to accelerate analytical processing. By providing training for the latest open source technologies, Big Data Partnership is filling the skill gap in the open source marketplace."

"We are happy to have selected Big Data Partnership as our first Spark Training Partner for Europe. With Big Data Partnership's focus and experience working with Spark and other big data related technologies, they are an ideal choice as a provider of Spark training in Europe," said John Tripier, Alliance and Ecosystems lead at Databricks.

Big Data Partnership is vendor-agnostic and partners with many of the world's leading big data technology providers including Databricks, Hortonworks, MapR Technologies, Couchbase and Elasticsearch.

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