IMS Health, a leading global provider of information, services and technology for the healthcare industry, announced that it has selected Cloudera Enterprise to support its Big Data Factory, a cloud-based platform that transforms data into intelligence for life sciences and healthcare clients as they navigate dynamic markets, drive operational excellence and demonstrate the value of medicines. The collaboration with Cloudera—a leader in enterprise analytics data management powered by Apache Hadoop and the latest open source technologies—will accelerate and enhance data acquisition, processing and warehousing in the factory.

“As IMS Health continues to innovate with Big Data, Cloudera will advance our efforts to build and provision breakthrough data processing and data warehousing solutions,” said Karl Guenault, chief information officer and vice president of Operations, IMS Health. “We’re excited to apply Hadoop and other open source technologies for integrating, processing and interpreting more extensive and granular data—helping our customers drive healthcare performance.

The combined solution will support next-generation data processing. Cloudera’s latest open source technology platforms support machine learning—which uses cognitive systems to automate quality control, data bridging and modeling, and other repetitive tasks—to drive evidence-based decisions for clients. Using the Hadoop cluster technology, IMS Health can extract, store and analyze vast quantities of unstructured data for generating new, more comprehensive insights for customers.

The IMS Health Big Data Factory will harness Hadoop’s parallel processing technology to streamline data acquisition and management, delivering powerful insights with higher efficiency.

The Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) eliminates data transfer bottlenecks, storage capacity delays and time spent adding new servers to augment traditional data clusters—enabling IMS Health to improve the speed and scalability of Big Data management.

“The insight that IMS Health will gain through the platform can ultimately be measured in better patient outcomes, and Cloudera is thrilled to work with them on this endeavor,” said Shawn Dolley, Cloudera industry leader for Health and Life Sciences. “As the leading provider of open source Hadoop solutions, Cloudera and IMS Health are uniquely positioned to support the growing needs of healthcare organizations looking to optimize their data utilization and provide better care.”