Not to be outdone by the slew of product and price announcements from Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft over the past week, EMC-VMware spinoff Pivotal announced a new product offering branded the Pivotal Big Data Suite on Wednesday. The platform delivers Pivotal Greenplum Database, Pivotal GemFire, Pivotal SQLFire, Pivotal GemFire XD and Pivotal HAWQ, in addition to unlimited use of Pivotal’s Hadoop distribution Pivotal HD. Because the Pivotal Big Data Suite is priced on the basis of an annual subscription for all software and services, in addition to per core pricing for computing resources, customers need not fear additional fees related to software licensing or customer support over and beyond the subscription price. Moreover, customers essentially have access to a commercial-grade Hadoop distribution for free as part of the subscription price. Pivotal compares the Big Data Suite to a “swiss army knife for Big Data” that enables customers to “use whatever tool is right for your problem, for the same price.” Customers have access to products such as Greenplum’s massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture-based data warehouse, GemFire XD’s in-memory distributed Big data store for real-time analytics with a low latency SQL interface and HAWQ’s SQL-querying ability for Hadoop. Taken together, the Pivotal Big Data Suite edges towards the realization of Pivotal One, an integrated solution that performs Big Data management and analytics for ecosystems of applications, real-time data feeds and devices that can serve the data needs of the internet of things, amongst other use cases. More importantly, the Pivotal Big Data Suite represents the most systematic attempt to productize Big Data solutions in the industry at large, even if it is composed of an assemblage of heterogeneous products under one roof. The combination of access to a commercial grade Hadoop distribution (Pivotal HD), a data warehouse designed to store petabytes of data (Pivotal Greenplum) and closed loop real-time analytics solutions (Pivotal GemFire XD) within a unified product offering available via an annual subscription and per core pricing constitutes an offer not easy to refuse for anyone seriously interested in exploring the capabilities of Big Data. The bottom line is that Pivotal continues to push the envelope with respect to Big Data technologies although it now stands to face the challenge posed by cash flush Cloudera, which recently finalized $900M in funding and a strategic and financial partnership with Intel.
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