Pivotal moves to open-source its Hadoop distribution, GemFire and Greenplum databases

As VentureBeat reported earlier this month, Pivotal, a spinoff of EMC and VMware, said today that it would open-source several pieces of its big data software. It’s a move that should shake up the hot but consolidating big data market.

Pivotal’s Pivotal HD distribution of the Hadoop open-source software for storing, processing, and analyzing lots of different kinds of data will become available under an open-source license, as will its Hawq SQL engine and its GemFire and Greenplum databases.

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In a blog post today, Pivotal senior director of product marketing Michael Cucchi spun the news as “the world’s first open sourced enterprise data portfolio.”

It’s not surprising to VentureBeat, which earlier this month reported that Pivotal was preparing to step away from the Hadoop market. The company is not actually stepping away from Hadoop, but by open-sourcing its distribution, it’s implicitly giving up on any attempt to generate direct revenue from selling it.

Meanwhile, Pivotal announced a new partnership with Hadoop competitor Hortonworks, which went public in December. Hortonworks is one of a few companies — alongside Cloudera and MapR — that have gained more publicly visible traction in the Hadoop market than Pivotal in the past couple of years.

Also today, Pivotal said it’s joining up with several other software vendors, including IBM, SAS, Altiscale, and Splunk, under a new “industry association” called the Open Data Platform.

Pivotal chief executive Paul Maritz first announced the company’s vision in 2013.

Today at 11 a.m. PST, Pivotal executives will hold an event to talk about its new vision for big data.