Industry leaders in the big data space, including Platinum members GE, Hortonworks®, IBM, Infosys, Pivotal, SAS, a large international telecommunications firm, and Gold members AltiScale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, Splunk, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Teradata, and VMware today announced their intent to create an industry association, identified as the Open Data Platform (“ODP”). The Open Data Platform will promote big data technologies based on open source software from the Apache™ Hadoop® ecosystem and optimize testing among and across the ecosystem’s vendors. These efforts will accelerate the ability of enterprises to build or implement data-driven applications.
A conference call with some of the founding members of the Open Data Platform will be held today for members of the media and analyst community. Call details are below.
As off-the-shelf big data technologies continue to attract the interest of enterprises, these leaders are coming together to help maximize big data adoption and productivity. Companies in the Open Data Platform initiative will concentrate their efforts first on developing and using offerings focused on core Apache Hadoop use cases. The Open Data Platform will provide access to a tested reference core of Apache Hadoop, Apache Ambari and related Apache source artifacts, which will simplify upstream and downstream qualification efforts ─ giving the industry a coveted “test once, use everywhere” core platform.
The ODP will work directly with specific Apache projects, adhering to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) guidelines for the contribution of ideas and code. A key benefit of the ODP will be for members to collaborate across various Apache projects as well as other open source-licensed big data projects with a goal toward meeting enterprise class requirements. The ODP is expected to promote a set of standard open source technologies and versions that will increase compatibility among big data solutions and simplify the process for applications and tools to integrate with and run on any compliant system.
John Magee, Chief Marketing Officer, GE Software - “Analytic insights from industrial big data are transforming sectors such as energy, healthcare and transportation, and GE is focused on enabling our customers to take full advantage of the productivity and efficiency gains made possible by the Industrial Internet. GE is uniting with other technology leaders to promote open-source-based standards that will help customers better manage and gain insight from their data. The Open Data Platform will foster compatibility and interoperability that will accelerate innovation and adoption of new data-driven solutions.”
Shaun Connolly, Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Hortonworks - “The best way to accelerate innovation and adoption of platform technologies like Hadoop is through an open source model. The Open Data Platform initiative will rally both enterprise end users and vendors around a well-defined common core platform against which big data solutions can be qualified. This will free up the broader big data ecosystem to focus on data-driven applications that deliver proactive insights for businesses.”
Beth Smith, General Manager, Analytic Platform, IBM - “As a founding member of the Open Data Platform Initiative, we’re excited to be part of the expanding community collaborating to shape and promote open source standard technologies for Hadoop. IBM has been a long time open source leader and community participant. With this announcement, we continue this tradition to accelerate Hadoop adoption as part of our broader analytics and big data architecture, enabling our clients, and ecosystem of partners, to infuse insight everywhere.”
Navin Budhiraja, Head Architecture and Technology, Infosys - “Infosys is seeing rapid adoption of open source software in the world’s largest enterprises across all major industry segments. As all businesses strive to become digital, they see an increasing need for a platform that can support real-time and actionable insights, self service exploration, and fluid data schemas to quickly adapt to the dynamic business needs. This will require them to deploy new web-scale architectures, and the adoption of these modern architectures can be greatly accelerated if they are based on open standards, and easy access to trained talent. Open Data Platform will create such an ecosystem, preserving the rapid innovation cycles of open source software, while still providing the benefits of broad vendor support and interoperability.”
Sundeep Madra, Vice President, Data Product Group, Pivotal - “Just as Pivotal and industry leaders focused the open source community around a common platform for the cloud, the Open Data Platform will rally an industry around a common platform for big data. This foundational step will provide a well-defined, mature, predictable and interoperable core to build on, furthering enterprises to adopt the best big data and analytical software to support data driven applications.”
Craig Rubendall, VP of Platform R&D, SAS - “Hadoop and the ecosystem around it have been built on new ways to attack big problems. SAS remains committed to innovation in big data analytics and to providing high-quality software that our customers can count on. SAS’ participation in the Open Data Platform Alliance aligns with these commitments, and will benefit the increasing number of organizations – and SAS customers – that are turning to Hadoop to store and process big data. With SAS software managing and analyzing data from Hadoop, our customers can solve their most pressing challenges – better interacting with their customers, fighting fraud, managing risk, improving product quality and more.”
