Technology Leaders Unite Around ‘Open Data Platform’ to Increase Enterprise Adoption of Hadoop & Big Data

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 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 coreof 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.