Pivotal, a vendor for enterprise services and software, has bowed to customer pressure and will be releasing its entire data analysis software suite as open source.
Pivotal has agreed to open source its analytics database Greenplum, its NoSQL database GemFire and Hadoop data set SQL analysis software Hawq.
All these software are part of the company's Big Data Suite, which is a collection of software products by the company that are available through a subscription license. Since its launch in 2014, the collection has generated over $40 million worth of subscription charges for Pivotal.
The Big Data Suite software are based on the data processing platform Apache Hadoop, which has also been made available as open source.
"Our customers want to be involved in our road map, because they know that is the only way they can differentiate themselves from their competitors," said Pivotal VP of products Sundeep Madra, referring to the trend of companies becoming increasingly involved in the development of the software that they use.
Enterprises utilize the different software included in the Big Data Suite to analyze collected data and to learn more regarding their operations and their customers. This would allow the companies to operate more efficiently and create better products. Examples of such enterprises that have used the Big Data Suite include Indian Railways, Hulu and Southwest Airlines.
Pivotal has previously released platform services software Cloud Foundry as open source, with the decision returning good results for the company. According to Madra, the success of the open source Cloud Foundry pushed the company to utilize the same set-up with its Big Data Suite.
As per Pivotal, companies are requiring software to be open source for several reasons, one of which is the desire of enterprises to not be locked into the usage of proprietary products. In such a set-up the vendor will be able to dictate the pricing terms of the software depending on the reliance of the company on the product.
In addition, open source software allows enterprises to participate in the future direction of the software, with the company possibly assigning its engineers to develop features that it wants to be added to the next version of the open source software. Open source software can also be customized by companies to be able to access features that are not available to competitors.
"This is a big change. Smaller companies like Uber are able to own their platforms through and through. They build them up from open source. They are not buying somebody else's technologies," said Madra.