Ocient partners with IMSA to support the school’s development of creative, ethical scientific minds and to keep the next generation of top tech talent in Illinois.
Ocient, the developer of a new relational database for petabyte- to exabyte-scale data sets, has partnered with the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) to support the school’s development of creative, ethical, scientific minds and to keep the next generation of top computer student talent in Illinois.
Ocient’s ten-year support agreement will fund infrastructure investment and expand students’ educational and professional growth opportunities at IMSA, a residential academy for Illinois’ most gifted science, technology, engineering and math students.
“Ocient is building an entirely new kind of relational database capable of instantly and cost-effectively analyzing the world’s largest datasets, so our talent needs are significant,” says Chris Gladwin, co-founder and CEO of Ocient. “Thankfully, we are already benefiting greatly from IMSA talent, with four former students on our team. With this partnership we are giving back to IMSA, its faculty and its administration, and showing these amazing students that they have a big opportunity right in their backyard at Ocient.”
Students at IMSA, located roughly 40 miles west of Chicago in Aurora, Il., consistently rank among the top in the country, producing notable alumni such as Steve Chen, Yu Pan and Russell Simmons, co-founders of YouTube, PayPal and Yelp, respectively.
“We teach our students to solve real-world problems critically and creatively, which corresponds well with what Ocient is doing,” said Dr. Jose Torres, President of IMSA. “Our graduates are the best and the brightest, and as such they can pick and choose the jobs they want. With this partnership, we expect many of them will choose to stay in Illinois.”
The IMSA partnership comes on the heels of Ocient’s successful recruitment round, during which a field of 2,400 candidates from top computer science programs was narrowed down to 21 new hires, the majority of whom started work this summer. Three-fourths of Ocient’s recruits were from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
For more information about IMSA, please visit https://www.imsa.edu/. To learn more about Ocient, please visit http://www.ocient.com/.
About Ocient
Ocient is building database and analytics software to enable rapid analysis of the world’s largest datasets.
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