Pivotal Software, Inc. has switched its Big Data Suite to a subscription model from a proprietary license. This decision, said Sunny Madra, Vice President of Data products at Pivotal, was made in response to customers behavior. “Customers are following a journey,” Madra said, beginning with Pivotal’s big data groups to capture info, then working with Pivotal data science grouse to gain insights, and then taking said insights and creating a data-driven app that runs in Cloud Foundry.

Pivotal also chose to open source many of their Big Data products, including Green Plum, Hawk and Gemfire. The decision to do so, said Madra, was a reaction to changing industry standards. Customers, he explained want to “get [applications] built their way.”

Reaching this attitude, said Madra, has been a two-part journey: First, companies began embracing open source, as the enterprise has done with Hadoop. And then, purchasing departments recognized that they shouldn’t be “locked into any one vendor.” They wanted the “ability for [their] teams to accelerate” at their own pace and in their own way.

The catalyst for this journey? Madra cited the success of companies like Uber, who don’t need to advertise. Instead, as Madra cited, they provide “a really good experience for the user, and that really drives their business.” The enterprise, Madra said, sees this model as their avenue to similar success.

“We’re in an age of digital transformation,” Madra said, in which companies value flexibility in a rapidly changing marketplace. It’s why Pivotal landed on the subscription model: “We see customers wanting to operationalize data,” Madra explained, and now they can change their Big Data licenses around based on their business needs.

Madra clarified that, of course, not all aspects of Pivotal’s Big Data suite will be open source. More complex operations, like WAN replication and continuous query technology in Gemfire, or the next generation query optimizer in Hawk, will only be available in the commercial distribution.

Overcoming Fragmentation with the Open Data Platform

Pivotal also contributed in no small way to the recently announced Open Data Platform. Madra described this choice as a way to fight against fragmentation in the ecosystem. “Think of Unix before Linux,” he said “distribution moved slower because there was no standardization.” With a common core of companies agreeing on distributions, Madra said, “that makes it better for customers buying software, and for developers creating software on top if Hadoop.” With standardization, he expects to see more Big Data applications. “We want,” he stressed, “to accelerate the ecosystem of software being built on top of Hadoop.”

In the future, Madra remarked that he is excited to see “the integration of cloud with our data products.” Furthermore, he commented that he’s excited to “push [ Big Data] products out of the EDW groups and into the line of business groups.”

Watch the full interview with Madra below, and be sure to check out more from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataSV.