Cloud Computing: The Pivotal launch and what it means to IT

Grazed fron InfoWorld. AuthorL Eric Knorr.

When I interviewed Paul Maritz near the end of his term as CEO of VMware, he offered this frank assessment of the company: "Unless we think ahead, we will be seen as the closing chapter of the client-server generation instead of the opening chapter of the next generation." That "opening chapter," or at least one version of it, was introduced last week with the official launch of Pivotal, a new venture led by Maritz, spun out of EMC/VMware, and boosted by a $105 million investment from GE.

Pivotal is a funny kind of startup, with 1,250 employees hailing from a grab bag of EMC and VMware acquisitions, including Cetas, Cloud Foundry, GemFire, GreenPlum, and SpringSource, as well as Pivotal Labs, a high-end Web and mobile development house. In "less than six months," that motley crew is scheduled to release Pivotal One, an enterprise PaaS (platform as a service) providing big data analytics — and eventually hooked up to "the Internet of things."…

You might be forgiven for wondering whether it will take six months just for this assortment of people and technologies to figure out what they all add up to. But what strikes me is that Maritz, with the aid of senior technology execs from EMC, GreenPlum, Pivotal Labs, and SpringSource, has succeeded in laying out a plausible pattern for a "next generation" of enterprise applications…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/t/paas/the-pivotal-launch-and-what-it-means-it-217453