This morning I had the opportunity to speak with Al Sargent, the product marketing guy for Pivotal One. He’s spent the past couple days in the desert of Las Vegas along with thousands of event-goers for EMC World 2013. Being that Al is part of the Pivotal organization, and we’re making some big presentations to the (EMC) world for the first time as a company, I asked him the simple question, “How’s it going?” and got some interesting insights to how EMC’s customer base perceives the new Pivotal organization.
Strong interest in the Pivotal story.
Paul Maritz’s keynote story was very well received yesterday and got people talking about why we spun out to work separately. Customers really liked how, by being separate, we are able to help solve the cross-cloud fabrics story on an even playing field. After that keynote, we headed to the booth along with many of the folks in the crowd. Our booth has a theater and we used it to run Pivotal overview presentations about every 15 minutes—to standing-room only crowds the whole afternoon. Literally hundreds heard our PivotalOne strategy by the time the first night of the conference was over. Hopefully today is just as busy. >> To meet the Pivotal team today, check out booth #235 in the Solutions Pavilion.
Strong data orientation.
EMC is obviously known for storage and that is a key theme here at EMC World every year. However, this year, data and storage are fighting for the headline. The data presentations, particularly those on Apache Hadoop, have been standing room only. Questions in the sessions and on the showfloor have increasingly gravitated towards data topics such as Hadoop, in-memory data, legacy database integration and more. This makes sense since data and storage are already different parts of the same coin, and is good validation that Pivotal is coming at the right time for these companies. >> Many of the Pivotal Big Data sessions will be repeated today and tomorrow. See below for the schedule.
Applications are differentiation.
Customers are validating that our applications approach is what sets us apart from other Hadoop startups. By rounding out Hadoop development to include it as part of your applications strategy, companies are seeing big data be baked in by default with the applications of the future. By basing this application on popular, established products such as Spring, Cloud Foundry, and open source offerings based on Apache Tomcat and RabbitMQ, we’re giving them an even bigger headstart by reducing the learning curve. Customers are seeing past the goal of big data Analytics, and looking to the future of big data applications. As Sargent explained to me, “It’s not enough to allow just a small group of data scientists to analyze data sets. That data has to be made widely available to the users that can benefit from it, and that requires custom apps — exactly the kind that Pivotal can help customers build.”
Missed the Pivotal Big Data sessions yesterday? Many are being repeated today and tomorrow. Here’s the list:
