Pivotal, the EMC- and VMware-owned software company, has packaged its entire list of big data products into one software suite it will offer on a subscription basis.

The product brings the as-a-Service delivery model of public cloud to Pivotal's database products, giving customers access to a variety of alternative database technologies without the risk of sunk investment.

The company charges users on a per-computing-core basis for the offering. This way, customers can use any of the products that are included in the package only when they need it, paying only for the amount of compute cores involved in any particular operation.

Pivotal will also throw in an unlimited subscription for its Apache Hadoop distribution, called Pivotal HD, to users who commit to a contract minimum for the entire Pivotal Big Data Suite.

Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware who is now at the helm of Pivotal, said enterprises should be able to use modern database technologies collectively without being afraid of wasting investment dollars. “With the Pivotal Big Data Suite, we are taking the lead for the industry by removing the technical barriers to data off the plates of our customers and move to a world where the choice isn’t about Hadoop or a SQL database, in-memory or real-time processing, but to efficiency and value,” he said in a statement.

The bundle includes Greenplum Database, the company's distributed data stores GemFire and SQLFire, its in-memory database GemFire XD and HAWQ, technology that enables the use of Hadoop with SQL.

Pivotal's new approach to delivering this set of technologies mirrors the company's concept of “business data lakes.” The idea is to be able to run analytics on any data type stored anywhere within the enterprise IT infrastructure to derive business intelligence.

EMC launched Pivotal one year ago, investing in a 60% stake. VMware owns about 30%, and the remaining 10% is owned by General Electric.

The company's strategy is to enable traditional enterprises to build and use software the way internet giants like Google or Facebook do. Pivotal and a number of other vendors are pushing the idea that enterprises will have to use software development capabilities to differentiate themselves in the near future.

In addition to its Hadoop distro, database and analytics products, Pivotal has a Platform-as-a-Service offering and provides agile software development coaching services to enterprises offered by its Pivotal Labs team.