Pivotal Launches Enterprise PaaS, Receives $105 Million From GE

Having been an official company for less than a month, EMC and VMware backed Pivotallaunched as a stand-alone company Wednesday, detailing its new enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, and a $105 million investment from GE.

Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz addressed a webcast press event Wednesday in San Francisco, delivering the story line and mission of the newly formed company, positioning it as a new platform for a new era. Citing the changing market forces of cloud, big data, mobile, and social Maritz said that the enterprise needs a new class of applications that deliver better user experiences and that consumer-grade capabilities are needed in the enterprise. While still servicing the legacy needs of the enterprise, Pivotal One will integrate new data fabrics, modern programming frameworks, cloud portability for legacy systems.

"It is clear that there is a widespread need emerging for new solutions that allow customers to drive new business value by cost-effectively reasoning over large datasets, ingesting information that is rapidly arriving from multiple sources, writing applications that allow real-time reactions, and doing all of this in a cloud-independent or portable manner,' said Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal. "The need for these solutions can be found across a wide range of industries and it is our belief that these solutions will drive the need for new platforms. Pivotal aims to be a leading provider of such a platform. We are honored to work with GE, as they seek to drive new business value in the age of the Industrial Internet."

Pivotal One

The Pivotal One enterprise PaaS platform combines cloud fabric, data fabric and application fabric, to address what the company sees as an $8 billion market that is expected to grow to $20 billion in five years. Three components make up the Pivotal One platform: Data Fabric, Cloud and Application Platform, and Pivotal Expert Services. The Pivotal HD  data fabric was announced in February by EMC Greenplum as a SQL parallel database on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System. With the addition of Greenplum HAWQ data services and Pivotal in-memory data grid technology, Pivotal HD provides proven technologies for analytical queries and transactional environments.

Pivotal Cloud and Application Platform is based on Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS, and Spring, the application development framework for enterprise Java. The application fabric provides a rich developer ecosystem that enables rapid application development and support for messaging, database services and robust analytic and visualization instrumentation. Pivotal Expert Services delivers the business value of agile development and sophisticated data analytics to enterprise companies on a project-by-project basis.

As a new stand-alone company Pivotal draws on an experienced set of talent from EMC, VMware, Greenplum, and many other technology giants. Along with Martiz, former EMC Greenplum executives Scott Yara and Bill Cook join Pivotal as Senior Vice President, Products and Platform, and Chief Operating Officer. Pivotal begins operations with 1,250 employees, including over 700 developers.

Strategic investment from GE

At the launch event Wednesday, GE announced its plans to invest approximately $105 million in Pivotal. The companies also announced their intent to enter into a broad research and development and commercial agreement aimed at accelerating GE’s ability to create new analytic services and solutions for its customers. The investment in Pivotal and new business agreement align with GE’s focus on the Industrial Internet. The partnership is key for GE, as it is working to develop a software platform that it will deliver as a service to industrial customers in aviation, transportation, healthcare, energy and manufacturing.