

The controversial Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi) has shied away from the spotlight in recent months, but yesterday announced that a number of prominent enterprise vendors have jumped onto its bandwagon.
The ODPi announced that DataTorrent, IBM, Pivotal Software Inc., SAS, Syncsort Inc., WANdisco Plc. and Xavient Information Systems have all signed on to its interoperability program, and will henceforth commit to making their applications and software platforms interoperable with each other. The announcement comes after the ODPi quietly published its first runtime specification last May, which establishes the technical ins and outs that such interoperability possible.
When the ODPi was established back in 2015, the initiative was warmly embraced by Hadoop vendor Hortonworks Inc., along with a bunch of other vendors such as IBM and Pivotal Software Inc. Shaun Connolly, vice president of corporate strategy at Horntonworks, and Leo Spiegel, senior vice president of corporate development at Pivotal, said during an interview on theCUBE that the ODPi would foster innovation in the Hadoop ecosystem by operating as a “common substrate,” or a “chassis” into which customers can plug whatever “additional elements” they need.
But the other two major Hadoop vendors, Cloudera Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc., refused to join the consortium, denouncing it as a self-serving initiative that would only benefit the vendors involved.
Despite this criticism, the ODPi has been chugging along in the background and today there are around a dozen interoperable applications that have been successfully validated on multiple runtime compliant platforms. To date, Altiscale, ArenaData, Hortonworks, IBM and Infosys’ Hadoop platforms have all been certified as compliant.
In addition to signing on the above companies, the ODPi yesterday announced that it’s adding Apache Hive and Hadoop Compatible File System support to version 2.0 of its runtime specification. The previous specification covered only HDFS, MapReduce and Yarn, and the ODPi says the inclusion of Hive in version 2.0 will reduce SQL query inconsistencies across the various Hadoop platforms.
“ODPi is providing a common platform to develop big data apps, enabling interoperability across different distributions and application offerings,” Ritika Gunnar, vice president of Offering Management, Data and Analytics at IBM, said in a statement. “In that spirit, IBM is ensuring many of our Apache Hadoop related offerings are interoperable.”
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