The recently announced Open Data Platform is intended to both foster innovation both on the customer side and throughout the industry. Shaun Connolly, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Horntonworks and Leo Spiegel, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Pivotal, sat down together on theCUBE to talk with host John Furrier about their contributions and expectations for the Open Data Platform.

Shaun Connolly, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Horntonworks

Goals of the Open Data Platform

Hortonworks and Pivotal are major contributors to the new Open Data Platform. By open sourcing their investments, Pivotal hopes to bring together “a bunch of companies to help accelerate the bid data space.” Furthermore, said Spiegel, Pivotal hopes to “enable people to have a common core” around which it is easy to innovate. The ultimate goal is to “create value” in order to help customers better “meet the needs of the market.”

Connolly explained that the Open Data Platform will foster such innovation because of it’s “common core.” It functions as a “common substrate,” a “chassis” into which customers can plug whatever “additional elements” they need.

In response to critics who have labeled the Open Data Platform, “just another industry partner consortium,” Spiegel says that the proof is in the pudding: it’s no small risk for Pivotal to open source “order a billion dollars of investments.” The decision, he and Connolly agreed, has a lot to do with furthering the industry in response to customer demand.

What’s Driving the Open Source Platform

The Open Data Platform, Spiegel said was created in reaction to the general sentiment from customers that “things need to go faster.” It, Connolly explained, is “more of a consumption thing, than a production thing.” The Open Data Platform, Spiegel added, is a response to demand for a “level of consistency” from big companies. With the Open Data Platform, he said, there’s less need for extensive testing or migration. Indeed, “there’s a lot of value that gets created in the ecosystem.”

By choosing “coopitition” instead of competition, Spiegel said that Pivotal will be able to “leverage resources in the open source space” and “help accelerate innovation.” It’s an opportunity, contributed Connolly, to “amplify the market” and catch up with customers new “expectations of consuming.” He explained further, saying, “The conversation with customers is ‘we’re betting our business on this technology,'” and the risk has driven more mainstream enterprises to “participate in addressing data governance needs for their company.”

The Open Data Platform, both Spiegel and Connolly agreed, will help both born-in-the-cloud companies and legacy enterprises create value and take advantage of new technologies in order to improve their businesses.

See the entire segment below: