ODP’s list of founding members is impressive: AltiScale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, Pivotal, SAS Institute, Splunk, Teradata, Verizon and VMware.
The say they have founded ODP to “promote big data technologies based on open source software from the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, and to drive collaboration, innovation, and standardisation across big data technologies.”
The announcement from San Francisco says Open Data Platform will also “optimise testing among and across the ecosystem’s vendors. These efforts will accelerate the ability of enterprises to build or implement data-driven applications.”
A statement announcing the formation of the consortium gave the background:
“As off-the-shelf big data technologies continue to attract the interest of enterprises, these leaders are coming together to help maximise 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 artefacts, which will simplify upstream and downstream qualification efforts – giving the industry a coveted ‘test once, use everywhere’ core platform.”
ODP will initially work directly with specific Apache projects, adhering to the Apache Software Foundation 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 to meet 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.
One of the major sponsors is VMware big data spinoff Pivotal. Vice president for data products Sundeep Madra said: “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.”
