Big Data expert Pivotal has joined the Open Data Platform (ODP) - an industry group established to speed up the adoption of Apache Hadoop in the enterprise.

ODP founding members include software vendors like Hortonworks, Splunk and SAS, infrastructure vendors like IBM, Teradata and EMC, and businesses offering Hadoop as a service in the cloud, like CenturyLink and Verizon.

Pivotal has also announced an alliance with Hortonworks, which will see the two companies align product development and cooperate on support.

In addition, Pivotal donated more of its code to the open source community in the latest release of the Pivotal Big Data Suite, including core components of HAWQ SQL engine, Greenplum data warehouse and GemFire in-memory distributed database.

Open source overkill

Pivotal specializes in cloud platforms and services, and develops a subscription-based suite of tools for SQL on Hadoop. As a subsidiary of EMC and VMware, it carried enough weight to get business traction, but until now the company lacked the open source credentials of some of its more free-spirited competitors.

Pivotal hopes to fix this by joining ODP and cozying up to Hortonworks, which has close ties to the Apache Software Foundation and recruits its developers directly from the open source community.

Pivotal will work with Hortonworks on product integration, engineering and support. As part of the deal, all components of the Pivotal Big Data Suite will be available on the Hortonworks Data Platform.

“Our partnership with Hortonworks maintains the speed and flexibility of open source, while bringing world-class, modern data analytics and services vital to enterprises,” said Sundeep Madra, vice president of Data Product Group at Pivotal.

Meanwhile ODP will maintain a tested reference core of the Apache Hadoop, Apache Ambari and related open source projects, hoping to simplify development for its members and enable “test once, use everywhere” functionality.

The Big Data Suite itself is offered as a single subscription, fit for everyone from app developers to data scientists. The latest version, available immediately, includes new Spring XD distributed framework for data processing, as well as support for Redis key-value store and RabbitMQ app message queue. But more importantly, it reveals the code of HAWQ, Greenplum and GemFire for the very first time.

“We’ve been encouraged by the positive reception we’ve received from our largest customers/partners, and hope that it will represent a significant turning point for an industry that has been traditionally dominated by closed, proprietary database products,” said Scott Yara, president of Pivotal.