Pivotal Open Sources Key Parts of Its Big Data Suite

Pivotal announced today that it was moving three core pieces of its Big Data Suite to open source, while continuing to offer advanced features and support in a commercial version.

The three components moving to open sourceare GemFire, the platforms in-Memory NoSQL Database, the enterprise SQL on Hadoop component, HAWQ and the suites massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics database, Greenplum DB.

One of the reasons it felt comfortable movingin this direction with the Big Data Suite was its success with Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform as a Service offering that followed an identical model of open source and commercial versions.

We have had a lot of success with Cloud Foundry and weve been able to monetizeit, explained Sundeep Madra, VP and GM of the data product group at Pivotal. The company felt it could build on this success by taking the same tack with the Big Data Suite.

Pivotal was hearing from customers that they wanted the flexibility of open source software in other areas, which also helped pushed the company to make this move. One of the things weve realized is that open source is critical to enterprise buying patterns, Madra said. Pivotal has actually been seeing open source show up as anRFP requirement, and companies have expressed a need for freedom from vendor lock-in.

There is definitely a notion that if you are a customer using an enterprise distribution of open source, youre not locked into anything, Madra explained.

Whats more, customers using open source software dont have to wait for the company to get around to developing a requiredfeature. They can work with the company or a third party or build it themselves.Customers can take control of the project and solve it on their timeline, he explained.

Its worth pointing out that Pivotal is a joint venture of General Electric, EMC and VMware, but it operatesindependent of these organization. The idea was to create a company that could make its own way and use technology in ways that the parent companies might not have the agility orcreativity to do.

This type of move is precisely what theyhad in mind when they spun out Pivotal. Even thoughtools such as Greenplum DB were developed at great expense, Pivotal is showing it isnt afraid to try new approachessuch asmoving thesecomponents to open source.

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Pivotal Open Sources Key Parts of Its Big Data Suite