MetaScale Hadoop Experts Named As Featured Speakers At This Week's Big Data TechCon In San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- MetaScale, the technology solutions provider subsidiary of Sears Holdings (NASDAQ: SHLD), today announced that two of its experts will be featured speakers at the Big Data TechCon, being held this week in San Francisco.

Justin Sheppard, MetaScale's director of technology and business operations, and Andy McNalis, a Hadoop infrastructure manager at the company, will speak on "Running, Managing and Operating Hadoop at Sears."  The men will discuss the use cases and technology that have enabled Sears to solve the problems of the traditional enterprise data warehouse approach when dealing with massive amounts of data. They will also address how Sears significantly minimized its data architecture complexity with Hadoop, resulting in a reduction of time to insight by 30-70 percent, and were able to discover "quick wins" in the process, such as mainframe MIPS reduction.

They will join other notable speakers such as Doug Cutting, the creator of Hadoop, and Chris Rogaski, PayPal's senior director of data platforms.

"Big Data TechCon goes beyond the hype about Big Data and focuses on helping IT and big data professionals learn how to actually master Big Data," said Ted Bahr, conference chairman at Big Data TechCon. "We needed technical heavyweights with deep experience in technologies like Hadoop to be able to give our audience real insights they can use, and that is why we turned to experts like MetaScale."

MetaScale also said it will exhibit at the Strata + Hadoop World conference, to be held later this month in New York.  Strata + Hadoop World is where big data's most influential decision makers, architects, developers, and analysts gather to shape the future of their businesses and technologies. It has become one of the largest gatherings of the Apache Hadoop community in the world, emphasizing hands-on and business sessions for the Hadoop ecosystem. It will also be an excellent networking event for developers, architects, administrators, data analysts, data scientists and vendors interested in advancing, extending or implementing Hadoop.

"Increasingly, companies that want to get the most from their Big Data have come to realize that a Hadoop implementation can be a key element in their success," said Ankur Gupta, MetaScale's head of sales and marketing.  "MetaScale's experts have delivered proven results at Sears and other companies in the financial, healthcare and retail vertical markets.  By speaking at Big Data TechCon and exhibiting at Strata + Hadoop World, we want to leverage our knowledge and work with other firms who face similar challenges as they seek to gain the greatest insights from their information."

About MetaScale

MetaScale, an early adopter of Big Data and legacy modernization initiatives, provides cutting-edge technologies, Hadoop training and technology solutions to its customers. As a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corp., MetaScale understands the value of heritage and the need for constant innovation to drive growth. Through this heritage, MetaScale offers a deep understanding of employing complex Big Data tools to solve traditional business problems in the enterprise. With services such as moving mainframe batch processing to Hadoop, MIPS reduction and ETL modernization, MetaScale can help organizations accelerate a solid return on their Big Data investments.  For more information, visit MetaScale at www.metascale.com.

SOURCE MetaScale