Today EMC announced it launched an open source community edition of the Greenplum data warehousing software, as well as of other tools and algorithms. This move is aimed to grow Greenpulm’s developer base in order to move it further towards default status in data warehousing.

EMC is not the only one competing to stay relevant in the data warehousing space.  With SAP, Tereadata and even Oracle breathing down its neck, building up an active data warehousing app ecosystem is a good move towards helping Greenplum establish a standard platform.

“Greenplum previously had a free “single node edition” of its database, but the more full-featured addition could reach a wider audience.”

The free Greenplum includes large scale analytics software Greenplum Database CE, open source analytics algorithms library MADlib and visual data mining modeler Alpine Miner. Greenplum community edition is of course limited to non-commercial use, and anything beyond research, development and experiments requires the purchase of licenses.

Greenplum needs to form a community in order to gain interest from ISVs, and open-source is the way to go.  Greenplum has a community following from their startup days and now brings that to EMC.

EMC has been very active lately, notably with its recent Big Data event in NYC where it launched a record-breaking 41 new products. SiliconANGLE attended and has exclusive photos from the relatively historical event. We also covered the launch of the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, and offered our take and analysis on Greenplum right after it was acquired by EMC last year.

Greenplum Community Edition is not the only recent news from the open cloud. Today Puppet Labs announced its expansion to Enterprise consulting services, providing aid in cloud system implementation.  IBM, another big player in the cloud space, has incorporated Hadoop into its GPFS-SNC storage architecture, and OpenStack‘s 6-month anniversary, meaning it’s off to a healthy start with plenty to celebrate (and look forward to).