VentureBeat is delighted to announce that Paul Maritz, the chief executive of the billion-dollar startup Pivotal, is speaking about the vision for his new product, Pivotal One, at our CloudBeat 2013 event in San Francisco on Sept 9-Sept. 10.
Maritz has called his coming product the “operating system for the cloud.”
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Maritz and Pivotal are key to our ongoing story of technology disruption because they’re promising to change the way people build and manage modern day enterprise applications.
Pivotal may be new, but it has the backing of powerful giants like EMC, VMware, and General Electric. Maritz left his role as CEO of VMware, a leader in the enterprise server market, with the stated purpose of creating a new platform called Pivotal One. The platform is supposed to enable developers and enterprises to build cloud-based apps that have all of the speed and delightful design of major consumer offerings like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
But at the same time, Pivotal One will enable them to do something they haven’t been able to do easily before: Let them talk with legacy enterprise-grade apps and data that are served from or stored on other clouds or on-premise.
Take the example Maritz uses from GE: A single transatlantic flight produces about 30TB of engine data that demands to be stored, analyzed, and mashed up against many other data sets, and that’s not a straight-forward process. As explained by here by Chuck Hollis, an executive at EMC:
Paul describes this as a “two order of magnitude” problem: 100 times more devices, 100 times more data than previously envisioned. Big numbers indeed; and even more justification to move beyond the familiar second platform.
One challenge that is unique to enterprise IT is the vast landscape of existing first [era] and second [era] platform applications that have to interact with these newer “third platform” entities: mostly as important data sources, but occasionally as recipients of decisions or transactions made externally.
Hollis, by they way, provides the clearest (although somewhat long) interpretation of Maritz’s vision I’ve seen yet. He also cites Maritz’s intent to build an “OS for the cloud age,” and from what I’m hearing, that terminology is becoming part of Pivotal’s messaging as Pivotal One roles out.
It’s an aggressive response to Amazon, which has built a cheap public cloud option with Amazon AWS, and is increasingly building out an ecosystem to support app development. Maritz hopes to preempt Amazon by abstracting layers of the technology stack from the underlying cloud provider.
Executing on the vision is a tall order; it remains to be seen what VMware actually rolls out this year. But the company has previously said Pivotal One’s launch would be in the second half of the year, and we’re already hearing that the company’s Cloud Foundry unit has momentum (more here about Pivotal’s details, including how giant IBM has already thrown in its hat in support).
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And Maritz has a knack of articulating clearly ambitious visions for the companies he leads. A native of Rhodesia, Maritz worked at Intel until he joined Microsoft, where he became vice president of platforms strategy and development. At Microsoft, he was recognized for leading the software giant company’s rise to the world’s leading operating system. In 2000, he left to found a company called Pi Computing, which was acquired by EMC. After EMC acquired a majority stake in VMware, Maritz took the helm of VWware, where he continued its dominance of the server market. He then widened that company’s vision when he announced what he called a next generation OS: “the virtual datacenter operating system.” It was something of a stab at his former employer Microsoft.
Can Maritz do it all again at Pivotal One? We’re excited to hear what he has to say. Hope to see you there!
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