Pivotal Punts Big Data Platform to Open Source

[SIbinPhilip]

Pivotal on Wednesday announced its decision to open source all of the core components of its big data platform, becoming the first big data industry player to do so.

The company also announced its participation in the Open Data Platform, which seeks to encourage more enterprise collaboration, along with the adoption of modern, scalable data architectures.

The opening of the Pivotal Big Data Suite follows Pivotal's success last year with open sourcing its Cloud Foundry.

"For a long time, we have been aligned with open source. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the portfolio followed suit," said Michael Cucchi, senior director of outbound products at Pivotal.

What's Included

The core components of the Pivotal Big Data Suite include Pivotal Greenplum, an analytical massively parallel processing database; Pivotal HAWQ, an advanced enterprise SQL on Hadoop analytic engine; and Pivotal GemFire, a NoSQL in-memory database. The open sourced core components are fully functional.

The open source product is delivered via an open cloud platform that addresses customer interest in going beyond data storage. The big data suite provides support for bare metal commodity hardware, appliance-based delivery and virtualized instances. It also offers public, private and hybrid cloud support.

"By making such a wide ranging open source release, Pivotal is making its software available to testers and hand coders at the grass roots level," said John Myers, managing research director for business intelligence and data warehousing at Enterprise Management Associates.

Shared Development Results

Pivotal hopes to grow the success of its big data suite the same way it grew the foundry, which became one of the most successful open source products ever, according to Cucci.

"We know that it works. This creates a lot of codevelopment with customers," he said.

The ability to provide multiple implementation avenues and be viewed as an open technology partner, as opposed to a licensed software provider, will open Pivotal's data management platforms to the same type of audience as its Cloud Foundry PaaS customer base, observed Myers.

"Internet of Things implementations will require this type of open, agile and adaptive platform to be successful," he said. "Pivotal's ability to combine open systems, proven technology, cloud delivery, and expertise in agile methodologies is well matched to provide value in the evolving world of big data and IoT."