Pivotal Labs yesterday revealed its grandiose plans for the future of PaaS, IaaS and cloud-based software development. Pivotal Labs’ CEO Paul Maritz left the top spot at VMware to head up Pivotal Labs last year, but only yesterday did the company make its game plan public.
That game plan is, essentially, to provide a software and data-fabric layer on top of Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Using a large stack built with many different EMC and VMware technologies (such as Spring, Cloud Foundry, GemFire and GreenPlum), the platform, called Pivotal One, aims to be the PaaS to end all PaaSes.
On April 1, Pivotal Labs, owned by EMC and VMware, was spun out as a separate company. Yesterday, as the company was officially launched, a third investor joined the ownership team: General Electric invested US$105 million under the auspices of building next-generation industrial control and monitoring systems on top of Pivotal One.
Maritz said “The short reason for Pivotal’s existence is that we believe there’s a need for a new platform for a new era. We’re going to go set out on a journey to build that platform and enable new and exciting things to be done.”
Maritz referenced IDC Research, which has identified a forthcoming third generation of enterprise IT infrastructure. “We believe we are on the verge of a transition to a third platform, in IDC’s parlance,” he said, “which will be led by applications that can’t be done on existing enterprise IT substructures. This will require new data fabrics and a cloud-enabled data center. Where is this coming from? Who has used this to drive significant business value? The Googles, Facebooks and Amazons of the world. If you look at the way they do IT, it’s significantly different from how enterprises do IT today.”
The Pivotal One platform features a number of capabilities that extend beyond traditional PaaS. While Cloud Foundry is a part of the Pivotal One stack, the platform also includes a Hadoop data-analysis layer, an analytics layer, and a host of consulting services aimed at helping enterprises gain agility through the implementation of a Pivotal One PaaS.
Maritz also pointed out that the standard for enterprise PaaS today requires multi-cloud support. To that end, Pivotal One will endeavor to run on top of Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and VMware, enabling cross-cloud compatibility.
Pivotal One’s road map should take some time to implement, but Pivotal Labs representatives spent a great deal of time at the launch event discussing the experience of the Pivotal One team, which was pieced together from existing EMC and VMware software groups. James Bayer and James Watters, two of the lead developers of Cloud Foundry, are working on Pivotal One. The company also employs