Owen becomes director of data science in London and the company said the move would allow him to develop tools to make it easier for other companies to build predictive engines on top of Cloudera’s set of Hadoop technologies and service.

Owen set up Myrrix last year to commercialise large-scale machine learning based on Apache Hadoop and Apache Mahout.

Writing about the acquisition, Owen said it had been a scramble building software and watching early customers get real, big data-sized machine learning into production.

He added: “Cloudera has made an increasingly complex big-data ecosystem increasingly accessible and we’re going to make ‘Big Learning’ on Hadoop easy and accessible too.”