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And whomp, here it is: The Pivotal Initiative brought to you by VMware and EMC

Barb Darrow — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:01:26 +0000

At long last here it is: The long-simmering VMware-EMC spin-off that is. The Pivotal Initiative will focus on bringing resources from the two parent companies to bear on big data and cloud application platforms, according to a statement from the companies

The effort, to be led by Paul Maritz, who was the former VMware CEO and then transitioned in the fall to EMC’s chief strategy officer, will be formalized by the second quarter of next year. Although not mentioned here, former Pivotal Labs CEO Rob Mee is expected to play a key role as well. The spin out will include technology and people from:

EMC’s Greenplum data analytics group
Pivotal Labs agile development
Cetas analytics services
VMware’s vFabric (including Springsource Java frameworks and GemFire data caching
VMware’s Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service

As GigaOM has reported, this move will allow the semi-independent organization to focus on the cloud application stack — using Spring, Gemfire etc. and will leave VMware, now under CEO Pat Gelsinger, to concentrate on its core server virtuaization business — which is profitable but is also seeing increased competition from Microsoft Hyper-V, and Xen and KVM open sourcerivals. And the spinoff will also bring EMC, a legacy storage hardware maker, more credibility in the booming big data and cloud space.

There are lots of questions still. It’s not clear where other “non-core” VMware businesses like Zimbra and Socialcast end up, for example. So, stay tuned.

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Why VMware is spinning off Cloud Foundry and SpringSource

Barb Darrow — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:59:32 +0000

To say VMware and EMC are desperately seeking enterprise cloud credibility with the proposed spinoff of Cloud Foundry and SpringSource along with key EMC technologies into a separate subsidiary might be overstating the case. But not by much. The move shows that EMC and VMware must strengthen their hand in enterprise software and cloud computing. The EMC subsidiary, expected to be announced this week, will focus resources — and about 1,000 former VMware employees — on this key segment where VMware’s buyout of SpringSource in 2009 and other acquisitions failed to gain traction.

With this move, VMware is taking assets that it undervalued and undersold and gives them their own launch pad. That reconfiguration will let VMware focus on core infrastructure — virtualization, software defined networking etc. — and work with other parties in application development platforms. The new subsidiary gets room to pursue other clouds to host its application services. Startups already use Spring and RabbitMQ, another VMware acquisition, to build applications. But enterprises want support, training etc. to put those application services on their own cloud without being tied to vSphere’s licensing and price model, according to one industry vet.

Taking on the cloud giants

The new subsidiary would also bring EMC’s Green Plum data analytics expertise and Pivotal Labs agile development into the mix. Together this melange of technologies — if put together right — could pose a potent counterweight to Microsoft’s Azure Platform as a Service and — perhaps more importantly — Amazon Web Services. Amazon is adding higher value services like the Redshift data warehouse as a service to attract enterprise customers. Redshift takes aim squarely at Oracle, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard — and you don’t get much more enterprise-oriented than that. And, cloud-based enterprise software mojo courtesy of this VMware spin off would give EMC — a legacy storage hardware maker — more relevance going forward.

Last July, in breaking the news of a possible VMware spin-off, GigaOM’s Om Malik and Stacey Higginbotham wrote:

“The move would help VMware, which is majority owned by storage vendor EMC, offer a competitor to cloud computing services offered by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. All three of those players are building out the infrastructure and platform layers to become the IT departments for developers and enterprise customers.”

VMware continues to dominate server virtualization in corporate data centers, but is struggling to extend that power into the cloud, and its core virtualization business is getting commoditized. As mentioned, it faltered in its effort to sell a more complete software stack — including SpringSource’s Java-based frameworks — to enterprise accounts. Key SpringSource execs left VMware because they felt corporate leadership did not give Spring technology ts due. The new subsidiary will be able to concentrate on that business and leave VMware to keep running its profitable virtualization business. Of course, that all depends on execution.

New subsidiary gets key piece parts, but execution is key

Paul Maritz, the former VMware CEO who became EMC’s chief strategist a few months ago, will reportedly lead this new effort. He is known for his technological smarts and strategic vision. And, his years as a top Microsoft executive give him credibility in enterprise applications. Still, under Maritz, VMware itself was unable to push its full software stack vision successfully. And the brain drain from SpringSource and other acquired companies could haunt the spinoff going forward. (Both VMware and EMC declined to comment for this story.)

Under CEO Joe Tucci, EMC has shown great adaptability and foresight with acquisitions including the buyout of VMware itself, that extended its reach beyond storage hardware. It remains the storage kingpin among enterprises running their own data centers but more storage workflows are moving to the cloud — where the brand of underlying storage hardware is of little consequence. EMC clearly sees that threat, but it’s by no means clear that the company has the mindset to compete with IaaS/PaaS giants like AWS or Google which have huge economies of scale. Cloud Foundry, an open-source PaaS that VMware encouraged other vendors to build upon while also planning its own commercial version, provides some assets that could play in the broader Infrastructure-as-a Platform space. It is unclear where other cloud assets such as the Mozy cloud storage, acquired by EMC but then turned over to VMware, will play.

But the long and short of it is that this spinoff is EMC’s and VMware’s latest attempt to grapple with that key web-scale enterprise cloud challenge. And to succeed, execution will have to be flawless.

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Remember that VMware spin off? It’s baaa-aack

Barb Darrow — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:25:04 +0000

VMware is finally getting ready to spin off most of its non-core products to an EMC-run subsidiary, GigaOM has learned. If everything goes according to plan, the move will be announced next week, according to several sources familiar with the effort.

We reported on a similar plan in July but now it looks like it’s ready to roll with the Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS); GemStone data caching technology; SpringSource Java frameworks and other non-core VMware offerings all moving over to a subsidiary owned by VMware parent company EMC, the sources said.

Sources said former VMware CEO Paul Maritz (pictured) will play a key role in the new organization although whether he would be CEO is unclear. And former Pivotal Labs CEO Robert Mee, will also be a key figure. EMC bought Pivotal in March for its agile development expertise

The move will free VMware up to focus on its critical Vsphere and VMware cloud management and virtualization business while the new organization will devote itself entirely to these other products which many say VMware has had a hard time selling.

“The only thing VMware can sell is VMware,” said one source familiar with this situation.

VMware made waves this summer when it talked up a paid commercial version of its Cloud Foundry open-source PaaS, and that ruffled feathers among many of the partners VMware had encouraged to build PaaSes of their own based on Cloud Foundry. By offloading Cloud Foundry, VMware can avoid that distraction.

VMware could not be reached for comment.

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Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:55:04 +0000

With enterprises now open to hybrid clouds, Amazon Web Services finally relaxed its rigid public-cloud-only stance and launched services to support hybrid-cloud deployments in the first quarter of 2012. On the big data front, the Hadoop players realized very few companies have teams of systems engineers to learn MapReduce. This has meant adding support for SQL and integrating Hadoop with existing data-management tools and systems. In other words, Hadoop has grown up and is now being taken seriously by companies like Oracle and Microsoft. This quarterly report examines these trends as well the exciting M&A and IPO news in this arena. It also includes a near-term outlook for the next 12–18 months.

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EMC gets it: big data needs apps, too

Derrick Harris — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:42:45 +0000

Scott Yara

EMC’s acquisition of Pivotal Labs proves the company really understands the big data market. Namely, that big data won’t go anywhere without great applications, and EMC isn’t the company to help customers figure out how to build theirs. It should probably thank its Greenplum division for showing the way.

At an event at the Pivotal office in New York today, EMC Greenplum SVP of Products (and Greenplum co-founder) Scott Yara let the world in on a dirty little secret: systems software company can’t build apps that users want to use. That’s why Greenplum actually contracted Pivotal to help it build the Greenplum Chorus product on which the company is placing a great deal of emphasis. Greenplum was so impressed with Pivotal, it decided the company needed to join the growing EMC empire, Pivotal Founder and CEO Rob Mee told me.

Of course, there’s more to the acquisition than just helping EMC build apps; Pivotal can help EMC customers build apps, too. Yara noted he’d heard of other application-development shops trying to position themselves as the “Pivotal of big data,” but now Pivotal itself is going to be the Pivotal of big data. Whoever’s playing that role, it’s critically important to the future of big data.

If it’s ever going to move outside the realm of data scientists and skilled analysts, big data has to underpin applications that are intuitive, easy and — dare I say — fun for everyday users. Those could be intra-company applications designed specifically for internal users, or consumer-facing apps that just happen to use the EMC Greenplum database and Hadoop products at the data-management layer. It doesn’t really matter as long as the target users can actually use the apps.

EMC Greenplum is trying to leverage Chorus — the software that Pivotal helped it build — to grow the application ecosystem, too. Yara said Greenplum is open sourcing the Chorus platform to help build a community of developers that can build apps atop the platform, which is a Facebook-plus-style platform for sharing data and data models within a company.

That EMC is making such a strategic push around applications isn’t so surprising. What is somewhat surprising is that EMC, a relative big-data newcomer, is the first one to do it in a meaningful way. Most big data companies (with the exception of IBM, maybe) that play at the infrastructure level seem content to stay there. This includes Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and pretty much everyone doing Hadoop distributions. Maybe seeing EMC getting into the application space will spur them to do the same.

I expect we’ll hear a lot more about this starting tomorrow at our Structure: Data conference, where Om will be speaking on stage with EMC Greenplum’s Yara, and where Cloudera CEO Mike Olson and others will be presenting on the future of Hadoop and big data, in general. Application development has to be a part of it; now it’s just a matter of who’s going to capitalize on that need.

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Exclusive: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

Om Malik — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 22:47:41 +0000

EMC Corp., the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage and cloud hardware company has bought Pivotal Labs, a San Francisco-based consulting firms well known for its tool Pivotal Tracker and also for its pioneering work on agile development methodology. I have confirmed the news after talking to sources familiar with the company. I had first reported on this earlier this week.

Pivotal has been involved with many web and mobile startups, including Twitter. The company’s agile development chops made it a favorite hunting ground for other companies such as Square. It is not clear to me why EMC acquired Pivotal, though a reasonable guess would be to take agile development and Pivotal methodology into the enterprise.

Changing Landscape

It would a different — and a smart — kind of services division for a company like EMC. As I have said before, large hardware vendors are facing a unique and new challenge from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who are getting the attention of the next generation of businesses. In order for these hardware vendors to stay relevant, they need to offer their hardware as a service – storage or computing for example – and then attract others such as startups and enterprises to their platforms.

PS: EMC Greenplum’s Scott Yara will be speaking with me at our Structure Data conference in New York on March 21st & March 22nd. I guess he and I will have something to talk about!

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Pivotal Labs is said to have been sold

Om Malik — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 04:18:43 +0000

Developing story: Pivotal Labs, one of the smartest Web consulting firms, known for its pioneering work in agile development, is in talks to be acquired, according to some of my sources. The San Francisco–based company held an all-hands meeting on Monday that lasted for hours, a source tells me. Pivotal is going to stay in its current Market Street offices. The buyer is said to be a large technology company, but I am still digging more details on the buyer. So stay tuned!

Joi Ito’s Digital Garage, a Japanese incubation and investment company, snapped up Pivotal Singapore, news I had heard independently from sources. In an instant message conversation with me, Ito confirmed that the company bought Pivotal Singapore, but his group is not buying Pivotal Labs SF. Interestingly, on March 7, 2012, Digital Garage acquired New Context, a company that also lists Ian McFarland as president. McFarland was VP of technology of Pivotal Labs.

Back in 2010 here is what we wrote about Pivotal:

Pivotal Labs is a name that comes up often in regards to web startups, but it’s sort of an enigma. The company’s San Francisco office is home to the hyped-up distributed social networking effort Diaspora; its work has been credited for shaping Twitter’s development culture; and its clients include Groupon, Gowalla and Best Buy’s “Remix” API project. But what exactly does Pivotal Labs do?

Pivotal’s services are different from an incubator’s: It’s a consultancy that brings technical teams into its space to grow them, train them and help them build their products. Rather than Pivotal investing in companies, the startups and enterprise clients pay Pivotal for the service.

Pivotal has actually been around for 20 years, but in the last few years, it has created a sort of focused training program for technology startups and projects within larger companies. Say you have an idea for a company and raise funding for it. You then come to Pivotal, which takes on any developers already working on your project and hires new ones to round out the team. Your technical folks come into the Pivotal office every day at 9:00 a.m., sit down at a desk with a “Pivot” from the company’s team, and work in tandem as pair programmers for the full day until 6:00 p.m. At the end of period of about 2–7 months, you have a trained agile development team for building products with Ruby on Rails, as well as lot of progress on your product.

A few more reasons you may have heard of Pivotal: Pivotal Tracker, which the company developed to help clients plan and execute projects, is a free agile development tool that has hundreds of thousands of users.

In recent years, Pivotal has become a favorite recruiting ground for fast-growing companies. Square, for example, was one of the more desired destinations of those leaving the company.

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Inside Pivotal Labs, the Agile Force Behind Twitter and Groupon

Liz Gannes — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 00:00:48 +0000

Pivotal Labs is a name that comes up often in regards to web startups, but it’s sort of an enigma. The company’s San Francisco office is home to the hyped-up distributed social networking effort Diaspora; its work has been credited for shaping Twitter’s development culture; and its clients include Groupon, Gowalla and Best Buy’s “Remix” API project. But what exactly does Pivotal Labs do?

All those mentions were enough to get me intrigued, so last week Chris Albrecht and I paid a visit to Pivotal’s San Francisco office to find out more. The office has all the trappings of a startup incubator: Ping-Pong games, ample snacks, big computer monitors, bike racks and clumps of scruffy young dudes. But Pivotal’s services are different from an incubator’s: It’s a consultancy that brings technical teams into its space to grow them, train them and help them build their products. Rather than Pivotal investing in companies, the startups and enterprise clients pay Pivotal for the service.

Pivotal has actually been around for 20 years, but in the last few years, it has created a sort of focused training program for technology startups and projects within larger companies. Say you have an idea for a company and raise funding for it. You then come to Pivotal, which takes on any developers already working on your project and hires new ones to round out the team. Your technical folks come into the Pivotal office every day at 9:00 a.m., sit down at a desk with a “Pivot” from the company’s team, and work in tandem as pair programmers for the full day until 6:00 p.m. At the end of period of about 2-7 months, you have a trained agile development team for building products with Ruby on Rails, as well as lot of progress on your product.

Pivotal charges by the hour for its programmers’ time, and throws in lots of perks: computers and monitors, breakfast, desks for founders and Ping-Pong. Companies pay Pivotal between $150,000 and $600,000 on average, according to VP Technology and Principal Ian McFarland.

Current Pivotal clients include Best Buy, EMI, Groupon, MavenLink, and goBalto. Recent clients include Twitter, Gowalla, Urban Dictionary, Indaba Music, CitySearch and the Associated Press. In the video, McFarland explains the arrangement with Diaspora, which currently operates out of the Pivotal San Francisco office. The Diaspora founders, who didn’t go back to NYU this fall, are using the Pivotal space for free because the company is interested in their project. McFarland also talks about former client Twitter, which has been effusive in attributing improvements in its development culture to its work with Pivotal. I ask McFarland if that’s really such a good thing given Twitter’s widely known technical problems.

A few more reasons you may have heard of Pivotal: Pivotal Tracker, which the company developed to help clients plan and execute projects, is a free agile development tool that has hundreds of thousands of users. And, the company’s New York office is going to be the home of the new TechStars edition there starting in January. Check out the video to get a better idea of who and what’s behind all this.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Lisa Brewster.

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