Open for Innovation | KNIME

In early 2004 at the University of Konstanz in South Germany, a team of developers from a Silicon Valley software company specializing in pharmaceutical applications started working on a new open source platform as a collaboration and research tool. It was clear from day one that the platform would have to work with huge amounts of diverse data. The original team - Michael, Peter, Thomas, and Bernd - applied modern software engineering standards and created a robust, modular, and highly scalable platform encompassing various data loading, transformation, analysis, and visual exploration modules.


The first version of KNIME Analytics Platform was released in July of 2006 and was quickly adopted by several pharmaceutical companies and the open source community as well as other software vendors soon started building KNIME-based solutions. Soon afterwards, the KNIME team began organizing annual user group meetings - now known as the KNIME Summits - to connect the community.


Today, KNIME users can be found in many departments in large-scale enterprises across a wide range of industries including life sciences, financial services, publishers, retailers and e-tailers, manufacturing, consulting firms, government, and research, and more – in over 60 countries.


KNIME and Openness
At KNIME, we firmly believe in openness and the power of the community. Our philosophy is to maintain and develop an open source platform that contains all the functionality any individual might require and to continue adding functionality through both our own work and that of the community.


KNIME Analytics Platform - Open Source
Unlike other open source products, KNIME Analytics Platform is not a cut-down version and there are no artificial limitations on execution environment or data size: If you have enough local or cloud based space and compute power, you can run projects with billions of rows, as many KNIME users currently do.


KNIME is written in Java and based on Eclipse, the open source multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment (IDE) and an extensible plug-in system. KNIME Analytics Platform is released under an Open Source GPLv3 license with an exception that allows others to use the well-defined node API to add proprietary extensions. This permits commercial software vendors to add wrappers so that their tools can be executed from within KNIME.


The KNIME Community
Open platforms make it easy to share and collectively develop and integrate new tools. The KNIME user community contributes continuously by adding new integrations but also by just helping each other on the KNIME Forum and sharing ready to use workflows and components on the KNIME Community Hub. Without this and being able to integrate lots of new developments from other open source projects, KNIME Analytics Platform wouldn’t be what it is today.