“You cannot ‘out innovate’ the open community model,” according to Hortonworks, Inc. CTO Scott Gnau, who sees the appeal of openness in gaining credibility by sharing ideas, the ability to get more eyeballs on ideas, and the ability for developers and engineers to keep their skills up to date in a rapidly evolving workplace.

Innovate around the core

Speaking with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at BigDataNYC 2015 in New York City, Gnau said that Hortonworks’ strategy is to focus on the core, working toward making the core better and levering the open community rather than creating lots of peripheral new projects. Asked about how to gain value within an open community, he said that the “value is not in owning the software, the value is in deploying, delivering and packaging.”

When Vellante asked about Hortonworks’ involvement with the newly renamed Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi), Gnau said he sees ODPi as “really important for the industry,” elaborating that he sees having a core set of services, a common kernel, as allowing application developers to code to the lowest common denominator and know their efforts are streamlined and simplified.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE