The move by large businesses to embrace open source is providing momentum for well-heeled newcomer Pivotal.
EMC and VMware, along with GE, created the $1 billion-dollar venture Pivotal this year. The company’s goal is enable people to create enterprise-grade applications that run on the cloud — but with an open-source software driving it all.
Later this year, Pivotal rolls out PivotalOne, its main platform that brings together multiple pieces, including the incorporation of its big data assets. Indeed, CEO Paul Maritz is expected to make news about this at our upcoming CloudBeat event in September.
Pivotal doesn’t intend to play at the infrastructure layer, where its federation partner, VMware, is very much a leader. (VMware is a main backer of Pivotal, but the two companies are run independently). Pivotal wants to abstract that layer so that developers can support any app, regardless of whether it will run on VMware-run clouds, Amazon, or elsewhere.
Pivotal already supports Amazon, and later this year it will run behind firewalls on public clouds, too.
PivotalOne will incorporate several entities. First it will include Cloud Foundry, its open source platform-as-a-service that is already up and running. Cloud Foundry supports JavaSpring, Ruby, Node, Scala, RabbitMQ, and Redis. Second, PivotalOne will have other data and analytics technologies, including big-data tool Hadoop. Pivotal is doing this by drawing on technologies from its Greenplum, Gemfire, Cetas and PivotalHD properties.
Pivotal won a significant endorsement recently when IBM, the enterprise giant, said it will offer full support for PivotalOne, a move it said was driven by its customers desires for more open source software.
Pivotal is still getting off the ground, and its Cloud Foundry PaaS will have to compete with other popular PaaS’s, like Azure and Salesforce’s Heroku, Apprenda, CloudBees, Gigaspaces, and Redhat’s Openshift. However, Pivotal’s strength comes from its open-source roots and capability to wrap in world-class big data and analytical tools, something Salesforce doesn’t have yet. And by abstracting the infrastructure layer, the PaaS should be able to run on any cloud. There it is similar in its ambitions to another other leading PaaS, Engine Yard.
If you’ve used Pivotal’s cloud products, please let us know what you think, and get our free full report when it is released next month.