Industry leaders in the field of big data have announced the intention to create an industry association, identified as the Open Data Platform.
The ODP’s purpose will be to promote big data technologies that are based upon open source software from the Apache Hadoop ecosystem and to optimise testing across the ecosystem’s vendors. It is hoped that these efforts will accelerate the ability of enterprises to build or implement data-driven applications.
Members potneially uniting under ODP include GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, Pivotal, SAS, Altiscale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, Splunk, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Teradata and VMware.
Beth Smith, General Manager, Analytic Platform, IBM, said: "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."
This large group coming together signifies a concerted effort to maximise big data adoption and productivity. The companies which are in the ODP will concentrate efforts on developing and using offerings focused on core Apache Hadoop use cases.
Access to a tested reference core of Apache Hadoop, Apache Ambari and other related Apache source artefacts, hopes tol simplify upstream and downstream qualification efforts.
Craig Rubendall, VP of Platform R&D, SAS, said: "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."
Specific Apache projects will be worked on, which adheres to the Apache Software Foundation guideless for the contribution of ideas and code. One of the key benefits is expected to be the ability for ODP members to collaborate across various Apache projects, as well as other open source licensed big data projects.
Compatibility among big data solutions is expected to increase and it is also expected to simplify the integration of applications and tools across compliant sytems.