The Open Data Platform: 'We are not ganging up on Cloudera'
The announcement is a considerable landmark since the group formed in February this year.
Speaking during the Hadoop Summit in Brussels this afternoon, the vendors were quick to add that the Open Data Platform was not an attempt to muscle together and crush competitors like Cloudera, but was in the interests of increasing Hadoop adoption within enterprise.
"Different vendors coming up with different versions of Hadoop is not helping its adoption," Anjul Bhambri, IBM's big data and analytics vice president said.
"But we are not ganging up on Cloudera," she added.
For example, Facebook has its own version of Hadoop, and IBM and Pivotal were previously working on different versions of the technology. Now the vendors can offer customers products that are bespoke to same, standardised version. This will offer businesses the guarantee of a consistent, stable version of Hadoop.
Cloudera, another vendor similar to MapR and Hortonworks, is not signed up to the consortium.
Software firm Pivotal's strategy and corporate development lead Leo Spiegel explained that the Open Data Platform is working under the assumption that "rising tides will rise all ships", and that ultimately, "enterprises will vote with their wallets".
The vendors will release products at the same time and hope to offer businesses products and applications for Hadoop that will be guaranteed to integrate out of the box.
"This is giving customers choice of standardised platforms but mix and match with vendors. We don't want it to be that, because they have put their data all in one version of Hadoop they cannot use new analytics tools," Teradata's director of big data, Martin Wilcox, added.
"Hadoop is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous...It is very important for customers to know we can integrate with it."
The Hortonworks Data Platform 2.2, IBM Open Platform 4.0 with Apache Hadoop, and Pivotal HD 3.0 are all based on the common ODP core. The vendors and distributors today said the 'harmonisation' will ease the testing and validation burden for enterprise customers.
Other members of the consortium include GE, Infosys, Pivotal, SAS, and Altiscale, Capgemini, CenturyLink, EMC, PLDT, Splunk, Teradata, Verizon, VMware and WANdisco