Brief: Can Hadoop's Enterprise Loose Ends Be Tied By The Open Data Platform Initiative?

Hadoop is a must-have for large enterprises, but adopting it can be a challenge. Hadoop is not one thing, it is a collection of open source technologies and tools, some of which overlap, in a dynamic ecosystem. The result: The main enterprise-ready Hadoop distribution vendors (in short, "distros") compete to define the standard components and projects that enterprises should use. The newly founded Open Data Platform (ODP) initiative — an alliance of 17 vendors (and growing), including IBM, Pivotal Software, and Hortonworks — promises to enable "big data solutions to flourish atop a common core platform." But isn't this what the Apache Software Foundation is all about and what existing commercial Hadoop distributions already do? And why are some key vendors in the Hadoop ecosystem, such as Cloudera or MapR, not part of the ODP consortium? This brief analyzes the goals of the ODP initiative, the challenges and opportunities it will bring to the market, and the consequences that application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals will need to consider when planning and executing their company's Hadoop strategy.