Open source attacks data stack

Beverley Head
Monday, 09 May 2011 14:59

IT Industry - Development

A loose affiliation of open source organisations is forming, which hopes to provide a more serious challenge to monolithic data management and business intelligence systems sold by companies such as IBM, Oracle and SAS Institute.

Executives from Cloudera, Couchbase, Revolution Analytics and Jaspersoft will take to the stage at the Open Source Business Conference being held in San Francisco later this week to explain how they are creating what they call the Data Stack, intended to offer open source tools to enterprises to help them clean data, store data, analyse data, and present data.

They hope that much as the open source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl) was adopted as an open source web development platform, the Data Stack will be adopted by enterprises looking for an open source data management alternative.

Its proponents are keen to stress that the arrangement is a loose affiliation and common strategy rather than an official partnership, and while it currently comprises four organisations, the Stack as it stands could easily accommodate another four or 12 likeminded organisations according to its current protagonists.

Speaking to iTWire from the US, David Smith VP of community for Revolution Analytics said; 'In much the same way as the LAMP stack emerged I see the same thing happening with the Data Stack to manage data - store data, feed it into predictive analytics and then manage the presentation of data.

'Organisations that need to use their data have a choice of monolithic solutions from IBM or Oracle or SAS but we are seeing business start to adopt alterative solution and take open source layers where the obvious benefit is cost - but the second advantage is that you get a best of breed solution.'

The argument of the Data Stack group is that enterprises quickly get locked into proprietary solutions, from which it is costly to escape. Mr Smith said that vendors took advantage of that inertia to; 'Up the licence fees at usurious rates.'

Will others join the stack? Read on...