Technology Leaders Unite Around 'Open Data Platform' to Increase Enterprise Adoption of Hadoop and Big Data

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 17, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.

More information is available at opendataplatform.org

Supporting Quotes from Platinum Member Founding Sponsors:

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."

Supporting Quotes from Gold Member Founding Sponsors:

Raymie Stata, CEO, Altiscale
"Apache Hadoop is an interrelated ecosystem of solutions that serve the greater purpose of providing a broad platform for big data processing and analysis. As the business value of Apache Hadoop is increasingly recognized by enterprises, the need grows for a rigorously tested, consistent, well-defined release of this ecosystem. While the Apache Software Foundation continues in its critical role of spearheading the development of new capabilities for each of the Hadoop ecosystem components, the Open Data Platform will serve as a complementary body, providing a proven base against which product and service provider companies can certify enterprise-class solutions. We at Altiscale are excited to be contributing to this important effort."

Steve Jones, Global VP of Big Data, Capgemini
"Information and Insight is the competitive differentiation of a modern company, which means they need to be able to drive new innovations more rapidly than at any time in history. With the Open Data Platform we see an initiative that allows us to focus on business value and outcomes and that will help our clients adopt Hadoop with both confidence and pace. We see it as important that the Hadoop ecosystem can thrive and we look forward to helping the Open Data Platform community grow and flourish."

Gary Gauba, President, CenturyLink Cognilytics
"Data is key to unlocking value in business today more than ever before. Those companies that invest wisely in their ability to tame and utilize their data can reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, drive new revenue and compete more effectively at market speed. Transforming to become a data-driven organization requires not only the data and infrastructure, but also the analytics and advanced predictive algorithms to solve key business problems. CenturyLink is excited to join other industry leaders in developing a robust, scalable and enterprise-grade open platform. It is time to lift 'Big Data' out of IT and into the world of solving the next big business problem."

Tom Tormey, Vice President, Global Strategic Technology Alliances, EMC Corporation
"EMC is focused on ensuring that our customers have the ability to build applications that extract value from their data and leverage their Hadoop environment. By providing a common, predictable and stable foundation, the Open Data Platform helps businesses become more agile and focus on building business driven applications. EMC is proud to collaborate with other industry leaders in this association who share the goal of helping to support an open source-based Big Data ecosystem."

Scott Gnau, President, Teradata Labs
"The Open Data Platform movement resonates well at a time when businesses are challenged by the pace of change and the exploding number of options for data management. We are pleased to join the Open Data Platform with organizations that are engaged as Teradata partners – working with us to provide integrated, unified data ecosystems. We believe that together with these organizations, Teradata can make an even greater and more meaningful impact on the future of big data analytics while helping ensure that our customers have access to the most effective tools to realize more value from their data, faster."

Siki Giunta, SVP Cloud, Verizon Enterprise Solutions
"Data is the new currency for enterprises. An increasingly connected world produces more data in more places. The challenge for enterprises is first to bring all that data together and second to gain insights that provide a competitive advantage. We need to create standards for the growing ecosystem of cloud platforms, and big data management and analytics applications. This common framework will fuel innovation and market growth." 

Ben Fathi, Chief Technology Officer, VMware
"The Open Source movement is fundamentally changing the way that software is being developed in the industry today. Common frameworks and standards such as Open Data Platform will help solidify Open Source as a proven option for enterprises. VMware is excited to join other industry leaders to develop and implement these standards to drive more compatibility and innovation into the market."

Open Data Platform Member Supporting Blogs

• Altiscale – http://bit.ly/1v7TeuH
• Pivotal – http://bit.ly/1DzGTkj
• SAS – http://bit.ly/1DZQ1zt
• Verizon – http://vz.to/1DZPSfi

SOURCE Open Data Platform

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