It’s been a big week here at Pivotal, with the launch of Pivotal One. With over 30 unique articles written across the web, everyone seems to be talking about the changes underfoot. In case you were lost at sea, or somehow managed to play Candy Crush through the news, here’s a summary of why this is a game changer for the cloud.
We Are Planning For Your Future, Are You?
“Pivotal is aiming for the enterprise market that’s realizing that software is the biggest differentiator in any industry. In other words, every company is a software company and enterprises need more development speed and agility for projects that revolve around social and mobile, app modernization and business transformation.”– ZDNet, Larry Dignan
I keep going back to the news from a couple weeks ago, where Bain & Co cited that only 4% of companies are getting value out of big data today, yet the big data software and services market is growing 7x faster than IT in general. To me, this says there is an boatload of pent up demand.
This is like back in the early days of virtualization where most projects failed. Back then, people were doing virtualization to optimize servers and save money. The technology was there, with vendors from enterprise VMware to open source XenSource providing the industry with virtualization options. Thing was, the IT folks in the trenches weren’t ready. They lacked education and to some degree, the products weren’t complete enough. Management was thin, deployment processes were hard to standardize, and there was no concept of self-service—you always had to have IT involved. Then people started to realize once you had wrapped virtualization with enterprise-grade features, it empowered the business. It became so popular so quickly, and for a different purpose, the industry had to change the name to keep it new. And that is how “the cloud” was born. Now everyone realizes that the flexibility of a cloud model empowers the whole organization and gives them an edge.
This is where we are at with big data, mobile and general agile development today. We have a cloud infrastructure that works. In our terms, this is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). However, just like the server consolidation movement for virtualization, this is really just an IT thing. They are trying to do more with less people, and IaaS dramatically helps the admin-to-server ratio. Server deployments have standardized, and are repeatable, reliable and faster. Similarly, recovery from failures is faster too. End users may enjoy higher service levels, but IT is still very much part of their process. And when it comes to the types of things they want to do, like developing big data apps, IaaS does approximately nothing to accelerate it. It is still the same process, and its hard, and people are failing to either try or succeed.
This is why we created Pivotal One. We are reinventing the cloud to better fuse with the apps that run on it. We are baking in all the goodies that developers need to accelerate their successes. We are commoditizing it. We are making it easy for companies to set it up and set their developers loose. As Larry Dignan referenced above, we are paving the way for every company to realize they are a software company. This is what the market has been waiting for, and we fully expect to see the industry look to companies like IBM, Intel, Pivotal, Piston Cloud, Savvis and Verizon to point the way that the time is now. The technology is matured and accessible enough to mitigate the risk, and therefore the rewards are ready to be had. The game is changing folks, IaaS is yesterday—and tomorrow is all about PaaS.
“If you’re in the business of building enterprise software, scrambling to figure out what your company is doing around big data and analytics, mobile and the cloud, then there’s a fair chance you’ll want to pay attention to Pivotal.” – All Things D, Arik Hesseldahl
As Arik Hesseldahl alludes, there are people already trying to figure this out. Frankly, it isn’t impossible. Internet giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! already do this. But that’s the thing, they are internet giants with deep pockets and the ability to recruit some of the most obscenely smart people on the planet to work for them to figure it out. That is just not reasonable for most businesses. But, if you want, as Cade Metz cited in his article on Wired this week, “Google in a box”, then you should pay attention to what we are doing.
“But the wins don’t end there…In the age of big data and analytics, an ability to inform applications with data-driven insights is often key to staying in business and to gaining competitive advantage. Insights that impact matter and Pivotal should be able to both provide them and make them actionable.”– CMSWire, Virginia Backaitis
Much of this week’s news is about Pivotal CF, the platform that does the full lifecycle operations and management for the new PaaS. And this makes sense, especially when you think about it like this:
“The combined Pivotal One and enterprise Cloud Foundry release is a major rollout for Pivotal. The new products amount to a central hub for the company, to which many of its other services can be connected — whether it’s middleware, web and application servers, an application development framework, or big data consulting services. It isn’t just another addition to the Pivotal lineup; it can be what binds other pieces together. And it makes Pivotal into more of a platform provider than a vendor of piecemeal application and data services.” – VentureBeat, Jordan Novet
Cloud Foundry and Pivotal CF are a natural focus simply because it is the glue. But there was an important second part of the announcements called Pivotal One services. In all actuality, for many companies these services will be the accelerator to make all the difference.
“Among its selling points: It makes deployment and management of Hadoop — normally a pain — a snap. And that’s one of the ways Pivotal could stack up against the rest of the PaaS competition as interest in Hadoop as a platform continues to quicken.” – InfoWorld, Serdar Yegulalp
With built-in support for Hadoop, analytics, messaging and even MySQL, companies deploying Pivotal CF can now make self-service deployments of Hadoop powered analytics available to everyone in the organization. As I said in a post earlier, making big data real-time and ubiquitous is the key to enterprise adoption. If marketers have the ability to use the website or your companies app to analyze and mitigate customer churn, then they will. If machines can alert you to their maintenance needs, you will fix them. Plain and simple, if its within reach, then it will be used.
Same for mobile. This year, we officially crossed the mark where over 50% of all internet activity is based on mobile. Mobile apps are still hard for many companies, especially when we start thinking about it not just a check box requirement for the presentation layer, but as a tool to actually make money. This is one reason we acquired the mobile and agile development think tank, Xtreme Labs in October. We know big data and mobile needs to intersect, and needs to be a lot easier for companies.
We plan on being that company that changes the game. We are taking the cloud one step further. It will no longer be just a place to run your business, its now where you want build it too.
