Just two weeks after our launch, and Pivotal is at EMC World showing just how grown up this startup is. This morning in Las Vegas, Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz gave a keynote that ushered in a 3rd era of computing—and this one is squarely focused on apps.
Labeling this new age the “Consumer-Grade” era, Maritz shared with the attendees the vision and product plan for Pivotal One that advances this transformation in the enterprise. In a nutshell, this plan involves three layers:
- New Data Fabrics. Using massive amounts of data in real-time is becoming essential. While distributed data across commodity servers makes sense for scale, at some point you need to get all your data into one place to do anything with it. Architects are starting to create “data lakes” or “data landing strips” to phase data into one location to make it actionable. Betting hard on Hadoop and its HDFS file system, Martiz outlined a series of innovations to make Hadoop deployments more effective and more valuable to the enterprise. Starting with Pivotal’s own new distribution of Hadoop, Pivotal HD and including a number of other innovations such as Greenplum, HAWQ and GemFire/SQLFire, Maritz outlined a series of innovations and acquisitions that will help companies advance their data stories. Notably, Maritz underscored that these products are actually transforming data stories today, with HAWQ proving in a recent benchmark to have 10s to 100s of times performance advantage over every other competing data query strategy out there.
- New Application Fabrics. Most of this story today is based off of the Spring and vFabric assets such as tc Server, Web Server and RabbitMQ from VMware. Spring is actually an important starting point to the Pivotal strategy. Not only does it mean paving the way for the largest group of java developers to make their way forward into the next era of computing, but Spring is an excellent foundation block to help all developers in this effort. Spring is built with all kinds of connectors and functions that speed development and provide a wide array of developer services. Pivotal intends to add new services into the Spring Framework that allows developers to handle big data better. To start, it will also work with additional popular languages such as Groovy and Grails, and build in a new set of higher level services that allow applications to deal with data natively, including a new connector that builds analytics capabilities directly into the Spring platform.
- New Cloud Fabrics. Cloud fabrics are essentially the operating systems of this cloud age and Pivotal is aimed at making every application a first class citizen on any cloud. Maritz stated that it is imperative that applications can take advantage of any of the available cloud architectures including vSphere, Amazon Web Services, or any other cloud service your company chooses. In fact, part of the reason for the split was so that Pivotal can engage with each of these cloud vendors on a level playing field and advance the cause of application developers. As for the innovations here, they have a lofty start. Born from a group of folks that came over from Google’s Borg engine, Pivotal’s cloud fabrics will have a very sophisticated lifecycle and provisioning model that will allow applications automate provisioning and allow upgrades to happen in real-time and in place. It will also continue to be based on Pivotal’s open source Cloud Foundry, with the reasoning that Pivotal believes in this next day and age–no developer will tolerate vendor lock-in again, so providing it under an Apache license is key to encouraging companies of all kinds to plug in and connect to this next generation cloud fabric.
Before Maritz stepped off the stage, he also introduced us to the 250 professional services folks that come from the EMC acquisition that gave us the Pivotal name. For those that are not familiar, for the past 24 years, Pivotal has been the go-to company for any startup that had a great idea but no developers to make it happen. In fact, according to Maritz, Pivotal was the only outside vendor that Google would go to for the first 4 years. These “extreme programmers” are also available to Pivotal customers to help them architect their development organizations and applications for this next era. Pivotal Labs now supports multiple development centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boulder, New York, Boston and London.
For attendees at EMC World, please join us at the following sessions and learn more:
