Pivotal is looking to position itself as a front runner in open source big data

Pivotal has proposed “Project Geode” for incubation by the Apache Software Foundation, which would focus on developing the Geode in-memory database technology – the technology at the core of Pivotal’s GemFire offering.

Geode can support ACID transactions for large scaled applications such as those used for stock trading, financial payments and ticket sales, and the company said the technology is already proven in customer deployments of more than 10 million user transactions a day.

In February Pivotal announced it would open source much of its big data suite including GemFire, which the company will continue to support commercially. The move is part of a broader plan to consolidate its leadership in the open source big data ecosystem, where companies like Hortonworks are also trying to make waves.

The company also recently helped launch the Open Data Platform, which seeks to promote big data tech standardisation, and combat fragmentation around how Hadoop is deployed in enterprises and built upon by ISVs.

In the meantime, while the company said it would wait for the ASF’s decision Pivotal has already put out a call to developers as it seeks early contributions to ensure the project gets a head start.

“The opening sourcing of core components of products in the Pivotal Big Data Suite heralds a new era of how big data is done in the enterprise. Starting with core code in Pivotal GemFire, the components we intend to contribute to the open source community are already performing in the most hardened and demanding enterprise environments,” said Sundeep Madra, vice president, Data Product Group at Pivotal.

“Geode is an important part of building solutions for next generation data infrastructures and we welcome the community to join us in furthering Geode’s already compelling capabilities,” Madra said.