According to BARC, 83% of business executives view data as an asset to their organizations, meaning that Big Data expertise is essential for capitalizing on this valuable resource. Big Data analytics helps enterprises save costs, enhance operational efficiency, and improve the quality of services they provide, thereby significantly boosting overall business performance and customer satisfaction. As the demand for Big Data developers increases, finding experienced specialists becomes a real challenge.
So, how do you find a reliable tech partner that can understand and meet your specific business needs related to data and analytics? And how do you choose the best Big Data experts? Let's find out.
Where can you find Big Data developers for your project?
Europe, and CEE in particular, has long been the go-to destination to look for tech partners that can provide experts for Big Data projects. This is unsurprising since the region can boast an impressive pool of over 44K Big Data developers. Most experts are located across six countries: Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. Let's take a closer look at each one.
Poland
Poland holds CEE's largest overall pool of IT experts and Big Data professionals—approximately 492K and 18+K, respectively. However, over 40% of local engineers are involved in BPO and GBS and are therefore unavailable for IT outsourcing.
Nevertheless, there are 188 companies that specialize in Big Data analytics in Poland, which is the highest number in the region.
Ukraine
This is the largest country in CEE, with the highest number of IT experts available for outsourcing. The local pool of over 298K engineers includes approximately 5.4K Big Data experts.
Ukraine is home to many big companies with significant software outsourcing experience. Many local IT companies have established successful, long-lasting, and strategic partnerships (e.g. with Lebara, Fluke, Siemens, and many more). According to Clutch, there are over 90 Big Data analytics companies in Ukraine, many of which have 1,000+ experts on board.
Romania
The country has the third-largest IT talent pool in CEE and approximately 5.2K Big Data experts. However, similarly to Poland, a significant percentage of these experts work in BPO and GBS and, therefore, cannot be considered potential candidates for your project.
According to Clutch, there are over 30 Big Data analytics companies in Romania, a significant portion of which have 500+ employees.
Hungary
Hungary has the fourth-highest number of Big Data engineers among the mentioned countries - approximately 4.1K. The tricky part, however, is that there are only 16 Data analytics companies from Hungary that are listed on Clutch. Moreover, only one of them has more than 250 employees. This means that finding a reliable partner with enough experience may be challenging.
Bulgaria
Bulgaria boasts a talent pool of 101K ICT professionals and more than 2.4K Big Data developers. The country is home to 30 tech companies specializing in Big Data analytics and consulting. Around 26% of them are midsize and large vendors with 250+ experts in their in-house teams.
Czech Republic
Last but not least, the Czech Republic has approximately 3.6K Big Data experts in a 199K IT talent pool. According to Clutch, there are 24 Data analytics companies in the country, five of which have over 200 employees and significant outsourcing experience.
Read more: The best Big Data companies in Europe
How do you find a reliable Big Data partner?
There are many options when it comes to finding a tech partner, and this makes choosing the right one difficult. However, applying the following tips will make this process easier for you.
1. Look at the vendor's track record with Big Data projects
Before considering a potential tech partner for your Big Data project, you should explore their experience with such projects. Platforms like Clutch.co and GoodFirms should be your first reference point. They provide verified reviews from actual clients that have partnered with a company you are considering.
A high number of reviews and a good overall score is a good indication that a company has sufficient expertise and will be a reliable asset for your next project.
2. Make sure the vendor can help you scale your product
To operate effectively, Big Data projects require a fast network and efficient server infrastructure with significant computing power. However, since data tends to grow exponentially, your infrastructure also has to be flexible enough to be able to keep up with this growth.
Therefore, make sure your partner can help you with scaling your solution. Cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and GCP are particularly great at scaling Big Data solutions and are great alternatives for on-premises infrastructure. They enable efficient solution scaling and cost optimization.
Find out if your partner has sufficient expertise in cloud development and DevOps, and inquire about their experience with refactoring monolithic architectures into microservices. Solid expertise in these areas is of key importance for scaling Big Data solutions in the cloud.
3. Assess your vendor's data security plan
Losing sensitive data to security breaches causes billions of dollars in losses every year. Since your potential partner will access your data directly, you must ensure they have a solid security plan in place.
In addition to complying with established security standards such as ISO 27001 and PCI DSS, your partner has to follow the most common best practices of secure data handling. These include but are not limited to:
- Implementing static code analyzers;
- Caching data;
- Encrypting data traffic;
- Scanning third-party libraries for vulnerabilities.
Related: 25 best Big Data engineering companies
How do you choose experienced Big Data developers for your project?
An experienced Big Data developer who will bring value to your project must have the following expertise:
- Cloud solutions such as BigQuery, Cloud Composer, DataBricks, Dataprots, EMR, Snowflake, and Synapse Analytics;
- Ability to maintain older MapReduce Java code and rewrite it with newer Spark technology;
- Kubernetes constructs for building Big Data CI/CD pipelines;
- Programming languages: Java, Scala, and Python;
- Databases: SQL and NoSQL;
- Big Data storing and processing technologies: Hadoop and Apache Spark;
- Big Data quarrying tools: Athena, Hive, RedShift;
- Real-time Big Data streaming tools: Apache Pulsar, Amazon Kinesis, or Kafka.
More on the topic: How to drive maximum business value from Big Data development
N-iX's success stories: Companies that benefited from Big Data development
Now that we have explored all the intricacies of finding the best Big Data engineers, let's take a quick look at some examples of how experts from N-iX brought value to businesses.
Improved service quality and effective equipment failure prediction for Gogo
Gogo is a global leader in providing in-flight connectivity and wireless entertainment services. One of the challenges the company faced before they partnered with N-iX was the lack of proper tools and experts to handle vast amounts of data.
N-iX provided experienced Big Data developers who applied the DataOps methodologies to streamline the data flow within the organization. This allowed Gogo to effectively predict equipment failures and improve their service quality.
Explore the details of our cooperation with Gogo
Automated data extraction and data platform migration for a Fortune 500 industrial supply company
A US-based company that offers more than 1.6M industrial supply products needed to make their data management more efficient. They approached N-iX to migrate the existing on-premises data solution to the cloud.
N-iX engineers migrated the company's solution to a unified platform on AWS. As a result, the company enjoys more flexible data solution scaling, better reliability, automated data extraction, and reduced costs.
Learn more about our cooperation with the leading industrial supply company
Cost optimization and near real-time report generation for Lebara
Lebara, one of Europe's fastest-growing telecom companies, needed to structure and optimize their data analytics. To better utilize their vast amounts of data, the company required more efficient tools for data collection, storage, and analysis.
N-iX Big Data developers are building an Azure-based data lake that can store both structured and unstructured data. This cloud solution provides excellent scaling capabilities and is more cost-efficient than the existing on-premises tool. Moreover, the solution enables more effective and timely business decision-making with nearly real-time data streaming and report generation.
How can Big Data developers from N-iX help you with your next project?
- N-iX has 200 data experts with extensive experience delivering Big Data projects of various complexity;
- Our Big Data experts are proficient in all modern data tools and technologies, including Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Hadoop, and more;
- We make sure that your data is always protected by complying with PCI DSS, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and GDPR standards;
- N-iX has vast experience in providing Big Data services for many large enterprises in the US, the UK, Australia, Singapore, and the Nordic countries;
- Our company is a trusted name in the tech market, being included in various top software developer lists on platforms such as Clutch.co, GoodFirms.co, and others;
- N-iX's excellence in data engineering services was recognized by ISG, which named N-iX a Rising Star in Data Engineering.
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