The De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde School of Management and Information Technology (SMIT) is the first educational institution in the Philippines to integrate Academic Hadoop cluster using the Amazon Web Services' Elastic MapReduce in its classes.

The initiative was made possible through the grant of the global professional services giant Accenture and technology consulting firm Apper Digital Inc.

The cloud-based big data platform AWS' EMR is solely implemented in the fundamentals of the BIGDATA course, currently exclusively offered to the students of the Business Intelligence and Analytics and Computer Applications Programs under the SMIT-Analytics, Computing and Infotech Cluster.

The software assists educators and learners to easily access and expand their knowledge of complex and vast datasets, whether in online or face-to-face lessons.

It facilitates the processing and analysis of substantial files using the Hadoop ecosystem — an open-source framework designed to store and handle extensive records in educational and research endeavors.

The EMR likewise streamlines the procedures for establishing, configuring, and overseeing Hadoop functions. It provides a managed structure, encompassing the essential parts of Hadoop, such as the Hadoop Distributed File System and other significant Big Data open-source software tools such as Hive, Hue, HBase, Pig and Spark.

The system also enables users to choose the specific components they want to include in their EMR composition.

Benilde BIA mentor Romualdo Bautista Jr. concurred that the availability of the top-tier and premier instruments in the college allows the students to familiarize themselves with the industry standards.