Cloud Computing: Paul Maritz – Pivotal is a bridge to the future
September 9, 2013
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.
The first thing I had to ask Paul Maritz, CEO of the VMware spin-off Pivotal, was whether he had received any interesting calls from the Microsoft board on the heels of Steve Ballmer’s departure. Not surprisingly, Maritz said he would go "nowhere near" that question. But here’s why he is considered a potential successor: During his14-year stint at Microsoft, Maritz oversaw the development and marketing of some of the company’s most successful products, including Windows 95, Office, and SQL Server, and later presided over four years of impressive growth as CEO of VMware.
Maritz comes under the category of "visionary" CEO, a classification few would associate with Ballmer. But vision is a tricky thing. With Pivotal, Maritz is building a PaaS (platform as a service) for developing the next generation of applications — infused with big data and the onslaught of events that will flow from the Internet of things. The release date for Pivotal One, which will combine Cloud Foundry and Hadoop among other technologies, is set for the end of 2013. Is Pivotal too far ahead of its time? Or is the moment just right for building a platform to underlie massively interconnected, highly adaptable Internet applications?…
Another question that has dogged Pivotal pertains to the mish-mash of companies from which it was formed, with 1,300 employees who once worked at various EMC and VMware acquisitions — Cetas, Cloud Foundry, GemFire, GreenPlum, and SpringSource — not to mention Pivotal Labs, a high-end Web and mobile development firm. "Startups" pieced together like this don’t exactly have a stellar track record. Plus, GE has its hand in, with a $105 million investment and high expectations for Internet-of-things applications that today exist mainly in the imagination….
Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/paul-maritz-pivotal-bridge-the-future-226327