Inside the San Francisco offices of Pivotal, a business software outfit spun off from big-name tech companies VMware and EMC. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
Pivotal—the rather ambitious business software outfit spun off from big-name tech companies EMC and VMware—is open sourcing three of its key products, sharing the underlying software code with the world at large.
Today, the San Francisco-based company announced that in the coming year, it will open source GemFire, HAWQ, and GreenplumDB, three “big data” tools designed to help businesses analyze large amounts of digital information. “Our customers are starting to look to open source, and they’re looking to projects that have communities around them,” says Pivotal’s Sunny Madra, who oversees the company’s data work. “Customers want a say in the direction of software.”
The move is yet another sign that the world of business software is changing, moving away from proprietary software built and licensed by individual vendors like Oracle and Microsoft, towards open source tools that anyone can freely use and modify. With so many businesses now erecting their online operations atop open source software, we’re even seeing the traditional vendors change their approach.
Microsoft is open sourcing some of its key software tools. And Pivotal, with its roots in old-school software companies VMware and Greenplum, is another notable example. The company previously offered an open source cloud computing tool called Cloud Foundry as well as software based on the open source data-crunching software Hadoop, and now, it’s open sourcing the rest of its major tools.
“Pivotal is doing this in a way that a broader foundation of vendors and end using can collaborate on this software,” says Shaun Connolly, vice president of corporate strategy at open source software company Hortonworks, which plans to work in tandem with Pivotal on these tools. “The expectation this days is that software be driven through an open source model.”
Pivotal plans to open source HAWQ and GreenplumDB through the Apache Software Foundation and push the GemFire code into the community that oversees the open source database PostgreSQL. This should mean not only that the code is freely available to anyone, but that a broad community of developers—some inside Pivotal, others outside—will drive the evolution of these tools. Like many other open source software companies, Pivotal will make its money by helping businesses use the software and by selling specialized versions of the tools.
According to Madra, Pivotal’s big-data tools pulled in over $100 million in bookings from business in 2014. But he also says that businesses increasingly want to spend money on software that isn’t controlled by a single vendor, and he says that Pivotal has already built successful businesses around open source tools such as Cloud Foundry. “Open source,” Madra says, “is a trend growing bigger by the day.”
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