Pivotal recently announced the open sourcing of key components of its Pivotal Big Data Suite. Parts of the Pivotal Big Data Suite that will be outsourced include the MPP Pivotal Greenplum Database, Pivotal HAWQ and Pivotal GemFire, the NoSQL in-memory database. Pivotal’s decision to open source the core of its Big Data suite builds upon its success monetizing the Cloud Foundry platform and intends to accelerate the development of analytics applications that leverage big data and real-time streaming big data sets. The open sourcing of Greenplum, Pivotal’s SQL on Hadoop platform HAWQ and GemFire renders Pivotal’s principal analytics and database platforms more readily accessible to the developer community and encourages enterprises to experiment with Pivotal’s solutions. Sundeep Madra, VP of the Data Product Group, Pivotal, remarked on Pivotal’s decision to open source its Big Data suite as follows:
Pivotal Big Data Suite is a major milestone in the path to making big data truly accessible to the enterprise. By sharing Pivotal HD, HAWQ, Greenplum Database and GemFire capabilities with the open source community, we are contributing to the market as a whole the necessary components to build solutions that make up a next generation data infrastructure. Releasing these technologies as open source projects will only help accelerate adoption and innovation for our customers.
Pivotal’s announcement of the open sourcing of its Big Data suite comes in tandem with a strategic alliance aimed at synergistically maximizing the competencies of both companies to deliver best-in-class Hadoop capabilities for the enterprise. The partnership with Hortonworks includes product roadmap alignment, integration and the implementation of a unified vision with respect to leveraging the power of Apache Hadoop to facilitate the capability to derive actionable business intelligence on a scale rarely performed within the contemporary enterprise. In conjunction with the collaboration with Hortonworks, Pivotal revealed its participation in the Open Data Platform, an organization dedicated toward promoting the use of Big Data technologies centered around Apache Hadoop whose Platinum members include GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, Pivotal and SAS. The Open Data Platform intends to ensure components of the Hadoop ecosystem such as Apache Storm, Apache Spark and Hadoop-analytics applications integrate with and optimally support one another.
All told, Pivotal’s decision to open source its Big Data suite represents a huge coup for the Big Data analytics community at large insofar as organizations now have access to some of the most sophisticated Hadoop-analytics tools in the industry at no charge. More striking, however, is the significance of Pivotal’s alignment with Hortonworks, which stands to tilt the balance of the struggle for Hadoop market share toward Hortonworks and away from competitors Cloudera and MapR, at least for the time being. Thus far, Cloudera has enjoyed notable traction in the financial services sector and within the enterprise more generally, but the enriched analytics available to the Hortonworks Data Platform by means of the partnership with Pivotal promise to render Hortonworks a more attractive solution, particularly for analytics-intensive use cases and scenarios. Regardless, Pivotal’s strategic evolution as represented by its open source move, its collaboration with Hortonworks and leadership position in the Open Data Platform constitute a seismic moment in Big Data history wherein the big data world shakes as the world’s most sophisticated big data analytics firm qua Pivotal unites with Hortonworks, the company responsible for the first publicly traded Hadoop distribution. The obvious question now is how Cloudera and MapR will respond to the Open Data Platform and the extent to which Pivotal’s partnership with Hadoop distributions remains exclusive to, or focused around Hortonworks in the near future.
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