Hortonworks fires up Centrica contract: Gassy client to probe users' usage

British Gas daddy splashes into UK data lake

Blighty-based utilities multinational Centrica has announced a partnership with Hortonworks to support its efforts with big data – much to Hortonworks' delight.

Centrica, somewhat infamous for its British Gas division, will use Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF) to allow its analysts to identify patterns in data covering customers' energy use.

The company said that, "thanks to a consolidated data lake" consisting of about 250 node cluster which can accommodate about two petabytes – with plans to expand – the erstwhile methane monopoly has been able to "meet a large number of operational requirements".

Talking to The Register, Daljit Rehal, director of strategic systems at Centrica, said the utilities giant had found "traditional platforms were unable to cope with the volume, variety, and speed" that it needed.

Rehal, and Hortonworks' Andy Leaver, mutually thanked each other in a canned statement announcing the partnership and declaring that Centrica has built "the largest live operational HDP cluster" in the UK, and was set to reap the benefits from it.

HDP is a YARN-based offering in terms of architecture and resource management, operating within the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem for its storage. Support subscription agreements for users of HDP is Hortonworks' core revenue stream – and just as well, as the company recognises those who decide to implement the open source system themselves may not be too successful.

As noted in an SEC Filing earlier this month, Hortonworks stated "the market acceptance of HDP is critical to our continued success."

Additionally, the announcement of a UK-based partnership will be something Santa Clara-based Hortonworks is keen to shout about, as it stressed the importance of its "ability to expand into international markets" in the same filing.

“We couldn’t have embarked on such an ambitious big data journey without a partner able to understand our customer needs and the market we operate in,” said Rehal, adding: "Hortonworks has shown commitment to providing strategic counsel and advice beyond HDP, in line with our business strategy.”

“We are honoured to be working with a business with such advanced IT,” added Andy Leaver. ®