Aziza, prior to working with Alpine Data Labs and other Silicon Valley-based companies, began his career with Microsoft. He and Alpine Data Labs have embraced the open source platform and have incorporated it in the same OpenCore infrastructure noted above. Alpine Data Labs, like Cloudera and Hortonworks, places value on contributing back to the open source community. “I think the thing where I struggle a little bit with the argument being one versus the other only,” he said, “I think, actually, the truth is somewhere in the middle. It’s difficult to say, ‘Do you need software open source and software commercial to compete?’ I think in the end, the combination of the two could be the answer.”