Team Members
Lars Francke
Co-Founder and Partner
Lars Francke has been involved with Hadoop (and its ecosystem) and HBase since 2009. He's been a contributor to HBase and various other tools since then and gained Hive, HBase and ORC committer status. He is also an Apache Foundation member. As a freelancer he was focused on Big Data and Hadoop since 2009. Lars has given presentations and led training on various Hadoop related topics to a variety of companies. He has helped set up and troubleshoot tens of Hadoop clusters of all sizes and versions and has consulted with over 50 customers on different topics. Due to his involvement in many open-source projects he is well connected in the Hadoop and HBase world, and has partnered with Cloudera to deliver services to customers throughout Europe. In 2016 Lars co-founded OpenCore, a Hadoop and emerging data technologies advisory firm.
Sönke Liebau
Co-Founder and Partner
Sönke Liebau has worked as an Analyst and Architect in the financial industry since 2009 where he worked closely with both the business and developers to create data driven solutions. With a variety of topics like sanctions screening of credit card transactions, interest calculation as well as migrating and monitoring a full ATM infrastructure he has a lot of requirements analysis and system design experience. Sönke started getting involved with the Elasticsearch ecosystem in 2013 while designing and implementing a monitoring solution for a network of 4000+ ATMs. Since then he has moved into supporting his customers in gaining insight from data and supervising existing infrastructure based on open-source software. He is also the founder and organizer of the Elasticsearch Meetup group in Frankfurt and has spoken at other meetups. In 2016 he co-founded OpenCore, a Hadoop and emerging data technologies consultancy.
Lars George
Co-Founder and Advisor
Lars George is an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience, using a large variety of development environments to implement operating system extensions, sales and HR systems, and even games. He led a team of 15 people as the CTO of WorldLingo, a machine and professional human translation company, and lately acted as the EMEA Chief Architect for Cloudera, which he joined at ~60 staff, and left at 1000+. During that time he also had the roles of Principal Solution Architect and Director of Services, helping with setting up the EMEA field team and growing it from one to 50+ people. Lars has worked with open-source software for decades, and with Hadoop and HBase since 2007, becoming a HBase committer and PMC member in 2009. He is the author of O’Reilly’s "HBase - The Definitive Guide", as well as many articles and blog posts around Hadoop and other emerging data technologies, such as NoSQL and data architectures. Lars has spoken at all the major Hadoop conferences and many Hadoop User Group events worldwide, and travelled the continents in his role as technical advisor, meeting with a large number of Fortune 500 companies across all verticals. His mission as co-founder and partner at OpenCore is to share his knowledge, experience, and insight with users and customers alike, providing clear and practical advice.
In June 2018 Lars moved from an active role as Partner to an advisory role.
