XING’s 13 million members are better connected with Hortonworks

As the leading professional social network in German-speaking countries, XING is reliant on the quality of its data to provide its members with an ultra-personalised service, and Apache Hadoop sits right at the centre of this capability. XING has partnered exclusively with Hortonworks thanks to its true open source credentials; its deep understanding and contribution to Apache Hadoop; and its global footprint with local, European expertise.
XING joins a rapidly expanding community of European customers that already rely on Hortonworks to provide data intelligence in business critical environments. With more than 13 million members worldwide using the platform to find jobs, colleagues, new assignments, cooperation partners, experts and to generate business ideas, XING relies on quality data and the speed of its data analytics. The partnership with Hortonworks means that XING is now working with the Hadoop leaders to store and process clickstream, user behavioural data, social data interactions and server logs. XING will also take advantage of Hortonworks’ global support and partner programme, as well as local consultancy and technical expertise.

“We had been small-scale users of Hadoop for some time” said Daniel Olmedilla, vice president of Data Science, XING. “When it came to standardising our data infrastructure, we went with the Hortonworks team for a number of reasons, the most important being their commitment to open source and open standards. Through experience - and because Xing employs the best engineers to use and contribute to it - we know that open source technology provides us with the innovation, flexibility and security to provide a world-class service.”

In testament to XING’s commitment to bleeding edge technology, it is the first European organisation to deploy Apache Hadoop 2.0 through Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). XING is able to do this with Hortonworks’ support and partnership. Designed to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise organisations, HDP represents a major step forward as the modern data architecture. The YARN-based architecture of Hadoop 2.0 will enable organisations to take Hadoop beyond its batch-processing roots and deploy specific applications designed to derive greater business value from critical, and often untapped, information.

“As one of Germany’s leading technology companies, XING attracts the top engineering talent who ensure that the organisation employs cutting-edge methodologies and tools to keep the XING experience fresh, relevant and useful. It is the epitome of a modern, data-driven organisation,” said Herb Cunitz, president, Hortonworks. “Personalised services and predictive data analytics is how it adds value to its many millions of users. We’ve worked in partnership with the internal team to ensure confidence in their data infrastructure and provision Data-as-a-Service to the rest of the business.”