Technology leaders unite around ‘Open Data Platform’

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 intend 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.


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.