Enterprise analytics specialist Hortonworks opened its international headquarters in London on Wednesday.

The new office will oversee all Hortonworks operations outside the US, provide multilingual support and even offer hot-desking space to independent developers.

“We want this to be a place where people can come to drive innovation in the Hadoop community,” Herb Cunitz, president of Hortonworks, told DatacenterDynamics.

“We’ve got free Wi-Fi, free snacks, kitchen, function room – people can come in and use them as they want.”

Eating elephant

Hortonworks is a public company that develops an enterprise distribution of Apache Hadoop, bundled together with complementary open source projects. The company offers 24-hour support and prides itself on the large number of contributors to the Hadoop project that it employs.

Hortonworks is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has smaller offices in 17 locations around the world. The new office on Old Broad Street in the City of London is much larger than the previous site. It was designed to serve both as a community hub and enterprise showroom, with large open office spaces and dedicated meeting rooms.

Cunitz told DCD that 18 months ago, when Hortonworks first started engaging European customers, discussions mostly revolved around proof-of-concept deployments in small companies. In contrast, today the Hortonworks Data Platform is used by very large organizations, for example Jaguar Land Rover, Zurich and the UK Home Office – all of which were present at the opening.

Besides customers, the crowd at the opening event included industry representatives and the media, with everyone getting a slice of the green elephant-shaped cake (pictured above).

The new headquarters are clearly meant to serve as a testament to the strength of the company which is about to cross $100 million in revenue, just a year after going public.