NEC Corporation and NEC Technologies India Private Limited (NTI), on Tuesday announced the launch of a "Center of Excellence for Analytics Platform & Solutions" (COE-APS) for promoting solutions and services of NEC's Big Data & Analytics Platform, "Data Platform for Hadoop (DPH)". The COE-APS will simplify digital transformation and act as a one stop shop for both customers and partners in the Telecom, Retail, Banking, Financial Services, Insurance and Manufacturing sectors, as well as Government organizations. NEC aims to achieve revenue of more than $100M USD within 3 years of the COE-APS' establishment, which is being set-up with an overall investment of $10M USD over the same period.

The COE-APS will initially focus on markets that include Japan, India, Singapore, Philippines and Hong Kong, then gradually expand services throughout APAC and other regions. In order to support these growing operations, NEC plans to organize a team of 100 professionals within the first few years, as the Global Big Data & Analytics market is expected to reach $210B USD by 2020. Hadoop alone is expected to reach $50.2B USD by 2020. With the industry already facing a shortage in talent, specifically in Hadoop and analytics areas, the establishment of the COE-APS will help NEC to leverage India's strong talent base.

In recent years, the exponential growth in data processing is straining the capabilities of conventional databases and data warehouse solutions. With the advent of Big Data & Analytics solutions, customers can be reassured that data is comprehensively and reliably analyzed, thereby enabling them to make well-informed decisions at the right time.

Moreover, the COE-APS will leverage the computational power and scalability of NEC's specialized Hardware for Big Data & Analytics in order to flexibly handle the ever increasing demand for storage and computation by Hadoop.

The DPH features open source Hadoop from Horton works, as well as an analytics and Business Intelligence layer, making it a first-of-its-kind solution-in-a-box that frees customers from the burden of searching for the individual building blocks of big data analytics, and enables them to generate value from the enormous pools of data.

NEC has an accomplished record of contributing to national projects in India, including the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which is aligned with the Government's "Digital India" initiative. For the DMIC, NEC established a Logistics Data Bank (LDB) that tracks almost 70% of containers in India. In terms of the UIDAI, NEC provides a large-scale biometrics identification system which registered more than 1 billion people since its deployment.

"The key to success for organizations today is to make fast and informed decisions by extracting insights out of the huge volumes of data that are available to them. The new Center of Excellence is an important step towards utilizing big data analytics and NEC's Data Platform for Hadoop to provide benefits for government bodies and enterprises in India and across the world. Going forward, we aim to continue driving digital transformation for industries of all sizes and markets," said Tomoyasu Nishimura, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation.