The heavyweight members of the Open Data Platform (ODP) are making waves today with an announcement that shows they’re deadly serious about their plans to “standardize” Hadoop.

Speaking at the Hadoop Summit in Brussels earlier today, Hortonworks, Inc., IBM and Pivotal Software, Inc. said that from this point onward all three would use a standardized version of Hadoop 2.6 that’s built from a “common core” of components. The idea, says the ODP, is to solve the interoperability issues enterprises face when trying to work with so many different versions of the popular Big Data technology.

The ODP was formed last February amid a fair amount of controversy. Cloudera, Inc., which is thought to be the largest Hadoop vendor, categorically refused to join the consortium, dismissing it as little more than a marketing ploy by Hortonworks and Pivotal.

Nevertheless, the ODP’s members have stuck to their guns and today’s announcement is a significant milestone for the fledgling group.

“We’re all shipping the same version,” said Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of big data and streams at IBM, in an interview with CMS Wire.

That ‘same version’ is made up of Apache Hadoop 2.6, and includes the HDFS, Yarn and MapReduce components. It also includes the latest Apache Ambari software that’s designed to manage Hadoop environments. The ODP’s choice of Ambari is thought to have alienated Cloudera, which offers its own proprietary Hadoop management tools as a differentiation point.

Shaun Connolly, VP of corporate strategy at Hortonworks, told ZDNet the ODP would ensure benefits to both members and enterprise Hadoop users. For ODP members, they only need to verify their products once against the Apache core, while enterprises that choose to adopt ODP Hadoop not only benefit from stability, but should also have more Big Data apps to choose from in the future.

The ODP has some serious backing, with 16 members having signed up so far: GE, Hortonworks, Infosys International, Inc., International Telecom Ltd., Pivotal, SAS Institute, Inc., Altiscale, Inc., Cap Gemini S.A., Century Link, EMC, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), Splunk, Inc., Teradata Corp., VMware, Inc. and WANdisco plc.

Cloudera remains the most notable absentee, and MapR Technologies, Inc. is also missing from the list. But the ODP’s biggest backers still hope the holdouts will climb onboard at a later date, at least in public.

“We’re still hoping that Cloudera will join us,” Connolly told CMS Wire, saying the wider Hadoop ecosystem would only benefit from having all of its most influential players onboard.

Scott Yara, President of Pivotal, concurred, saying he was still hopeful Cloudera would compromise and join the ODP.

“Cloudera decided not to participate [at the formation of the Open Data Platform] and I respect their decision and our hope is they absolutely will join because we think it is the right thing to do,” Yara said in an interview with CBR.

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