The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service (NTIS) announced Oct 19 that, following a rigorous merit review process, it has selected Qubole as an eligible Joint Venture Partner (JVP) of the NTIS. Once the JV agreement is finalized, Qubole will have the opportunity to compete to work with NTIS on groundbreaking data projects conducted for and funded by federal agencies.
Government as a Catalyst of Data Innovation
The JVP program will provide innovative data services to federal agencies, through partnerships with the private sector that advance federal data priorities, promote economic growth, and enable operational excellence.
Qubole is part of a select group of 35 leading-edge organizations, including Amazon Web Services, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte Consulting, SRI International, and other small and large companies, nonprofits, and research groups.
The federal government collects an enormous amount of useful data about everything from weather and climate to statistics on the U.S. economy, population, and demographics to trade statistics by market and industry, including jobs supported by exports. However, many barriers exist to efficiently using, sharing, analyzing, and gaining insights from these national data resources, either alone or in combination with non-federal data.
Democratizing big-data access
Qubole will make its expertise in big-data analytics and award winning Qubole Data Service (QDS) platform available to the NTIS, its partner government agencies, and the public at large to remove these barriers, allowing researchers, data scientists, academic organizations, and students to query data in the language they are most familiar with, and using a number of big-data analytics engines, such as Hadoop, Spark, Presto, Hbase and others without the need for an in-depth understanding of the inner workings of the underlying technology.
“We want to accelerate the data innovation process by quickly connecting private sector experts with agencies striving to create smart cities, deliver critical public services, enhance operational excellence, or improve accessibility and interoperability among national data sets,” said NTIS Director Avi Bender, a press release.
“We expect the new data science platforms, tools, and apps created through these partnerships to help agencies save time and money through innovative, effective ways to manage data in carrying out their mission and operations,” Bender added. “By working on challenging data problems, NTIS JVPs will be in a position to leverage spin-off benefits through improvements to their data products and services.”
The full NTIS announcement and the complete list of eligible JVPs are available here.
