Over the past years, KNIME has grown from being an interesting new tool for data analysis to a platform for analytics that embraces openness at its core principle. In contrast to proprietary software vendors, KNIME allows integration from any source or vendor, transparency creating reusable workflows, collaboration both inside and outside of your organization, and agility for quick data exploration. The result is faster, more powerful insight into complex data. You can read more about the five pillars upon which an open analytics platform stands on here. This openness is something we, and many of our users, strongly believe is the future of data analytics.
While our community and technology partner network has grown at a tremendous rate, so have we. From a small university spinoff, KNIME is now a real – albeit still small – company with offices in Zurich, Berlin, and San Francisco and distribution partners around the world. KNIME Analytics Platform is open source and free. And will stay that way. KNIME generates revenue through additional software that adds value to the open platform, enabling collaboration (KNIME Server, KNIME TeamSpace), improving productivity (KNIME Personal/Partner Productivity Extensions – to be released this July), and scaling computation (KNIME Cluster/Hadoop Extensions – also available starting in July).
All of these, almost evolutionary changes transformed us from a group of open software analytics enthusiasts to a healthy business based on open source software and the accompanying open source community and a network of trusted partners. It was time to reflect these changes also in the way we communicate to the outside. We were fortunate to have world class designer Kenichi Nishiwaki and Frank Vial help us with this; they have done an outstanding job capturing the spirit of the KNIME evolution and transforming our existing logo reflecting the increased complexity and the many different layers modern data analysts face. KNIME continues to enable them to quickly point at the essence of the massive amounts of data they are dealing with these days.
We hope that our revised web site also reflects this message: this is not about a drastic change of a software or business model but about the evolution of something successful into something more powerful, more integrative, and more collaborative in a transparent way.
I welcome your feedback – and now: welcome to the new KNIME!
Michael