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

Apache: Big Data will bring together open source project committers under one tent, accelerating adoption of Apache Big Data technologies

SAN FRANCISCO – 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.”

“The Apache Software Foundation is excited about the new Apache: Big Data and ApacheCon: Core events, which will offer the technical content and networking opportunities attendees have come to expect while addressing the biggest opportunities for the future,” said Rich Bowen, Executive Vice President of The Apache Software Foundation. 

Collaboration is essential to success in open source, which means developers need a neutral venue in which to come together to advance their work. This is why sessions at the co-located ApacheCon: Core will be project-driven, with developers and code committers able to organize sessions around their specific projects, enabling a larger variety of projects to be represented than any prior Apache event. Some examples of projects include Apache Flex (web framework), Apache Stratos (cloud), Apache Etch (networking), Apache Cordova (mobile), and more. Bringing these different project teams together at ApacheCon: Core enables them not only to learn from and collaborate within their own project, but to cross-pollinate and share best practices across projects, helping everyone to improve.

Apache: Big Data and ApacheCon: Core Europe will be co-located in Budapest, with Apache: Big Data taking place September 28-30, and ApacheCon: Core taking place October 1-2. More information can be found at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-europe and http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-core-europe.

Both events are accepting speaking proposals. Interested parties can submit a session topic proposal for Apache: Big Data by July 10 at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-europe/program/cfp and ApacheCon: Core by July 1 at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-core-europe/program/cfp.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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