VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

Both execs, Javier Soltero and Kevin Henrikson, joined VC company Redpoint Ventures as entrepreneurs in residence.

Soltero joined VMware by virtue of its acquisition of SpringSource in 2009 — after having joined SpringSource by virtue of that company’s acquisition of Hyperic. At VMware he was the CTO of SaaS and application services.

Henrickson was senior director of R&D for Zimbra, the open-source email product VMware acquired from Yahoo also in 2009. The dual departures were first reported by TechCrunch.

It was clear last year that VMware was scaling back on applications — which had been a key part of former CEO Paul Maritz’s strategy. It subsequently spun off the Java-based Spring framework along with Cloud Foundry and other assets to Pivotal where they will be part of that company’s universal PaaS push.

Selling off the non-essentials

It’s fairly clear that VMware would like to divest itself of Zimbra, which doesn’t fit into its new IaaS worldview, just as it sold off SlideRocket to Clearslide and Wavemaker Java technology to Pramati, both in March. (Pramati just announced Cloudjee a new company pushing a cloud development platform incorporating Wavemaker technology.)

Early this month, Patrick Chanezon, who led developer relationships for both Spring and Cloud Foundry efforts at VMware, joined Microsoft as director of enterprise evangelism.

We can’t say that VMware didn’t warn us. In January, CEO Pat Gelsinger clearly stated the company’s need to focus and eliminate distractions. At about that same time CTO Stephen Herrod left the company for General Catalyst. Oh, and by the way, Gelsinger will be on hand at Structure 2013 to discuss VMware’s IaaS plans.

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The news came out Friday as part of a flurry of SAP announcements. Another of those also relates to a departure – that of human resources chief Luisa Delgado, whose responsibilities will be taken on by CFO Werner Brandt – but the big non-quitting-related news is that SAP is consolidating its business to better reflect its newfound cloudiness.

SAP’s cloud “go-to-market” strategy will now all be under the purview of Bob Calderoni, CEO of Ariba (alongside SuccessFactors, one of SAP’s major cloud buys of the last two years). And development will all be under the control of technology chief Vishal Sikka.

SAP is pitching this new structure as an innovation accelerator, but does it finally signal a streamlining of the company’s sprawling and often confusing portfolio (a condition I like to call IBMitis)? Yes! And no.

As Sikka said on a conference call today:

“We see an opportunity to not only consolidate and streamline the portfolio, but bring incredible efforts… to transform that in the power of the cloud. We will get into areas that are truly unprecedented – applications for new industries that weren’t possible before [such as] healthcare, banking, oil and energy.”

Which is nice, but – as co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe chipped in – SAP has “a lot of commitments” to its existing customers too, and “we’re a company that stands by our commitments.” This may mean we should expect some redundancy within the portfolio to continue for a while yet, in order to keep those with more old-school SAP systems in place happy.

As for SAP’s ongoing cloud strategy, co-CEO Bill McDermott promised that Dalgaard’s exit would lead to “zero business disruption”:

“Our cloud DNA is now embedded across 65,000 minds and hearts and it’s become the soul of SAP. While it’s nice to have one evangelist for the cloud, it’s even better to have 65,000.

“Lars took us from $20 million in terms of revenue to a $1 billion run rate in the cloud. Now it’s about scale because everything is cloud. No other company has gone through this transition so fast – it literally happened in 12-15 months under his leadership.”

McDermott added that Dalgaard had been having “open conversations” with him and Hagemann Snabe for some time about his plans to downgrade his role to that of advisor. “This is the nicest balance he could find in his personal life and we were happy to accommodate him because we think the world of the guy,” he said.

Speaking of SAP’s thorough cloudiness, the company also announced on Thursday that it would deliver its products – including, of course, those on the in-memory HANA platform — on VMware’s newly-re-announced vCloud Hybrid Service IaaS platform, as well as vCloud Suite. This will allow for fully managed services on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid deployments.

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The company is pitching the platform for both legacy vSphere applications already running in company data centers  and for brand new applications designed from the ground up.  VMware execs up to and including CEO Pat Gelsinger promised “seamless” interoperability between on-premises implementation and vCloud Hybrid Services.

They promised it will let customers move data from on-premise infrastructure to public clouds on Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks and create the same virtual-networking infrastructure like load balancers and firewalls. Management will happen all inside current VMware software tools. Managing and moving virtual machines will be possible inside vSphere through a free-plugin. The idea is to help customers move existing applications around and develop new applications on the public cloud. Some customers will want to run specified applications on the public cloud and keep key data on premises, said Gelsinger, who will be a featured speaker at GigaOM Structure next month.

Bill Fathers, VMware’s senior vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud services, described vCloud Hybrid Service as the easiest public cloud to adopt. It will be available through current partners, so licensing won’t be different. And customers can get support for the vCloud Hybrid Service from VMware, just as they can for other services.

Partners that endorsed the platform included  Tibco, Microsoft, SAP, Puppet Labs (see disclosure) and Pivotal, VMware’s step-brother that is co-owned by VMware and parent company EMC. VMware  holds a significant stake in Puppet. “VMware will be the first and only cloud provider to provide SAP software, including HANA, as a subscription service on premise and in the cloud,” Fathers said.

The vCloud Hybrid Service actually has two flavors: a Dedicated Cloud mode has “physically isolated and reserved compute resources” for predictable workloads and a Virtual Private Cloud for seasonal workloads that require greater elasticity but are multitenant in nature. The former service will start at 13 cents an hour for a 1 GB virtual machine with a single processor on an annual basis, while the latter will start at 4.5 cents an hour on a monthly basis. But those prices will come as year-long licenses. Fathers said he expects customers to use both in parallel.

To provide the infrastructure for the vCloud Hybrid Service in the United States, VMware will pull from infrastructure in Santa Clara, Calif.; Las Vegas; Dallas; and Sterling, Va. Fathers said the plan is for “an asset-light model” in which the facilities in those cities are “third-party data centers.”

Beta customer, Julio Sobral, senior vice president of post production for Fox Broadcasting, said the movement of certain applications to VMware’s public cloud, particularly collaboration tools for dispersed employees, had, in fact, been “seamless.”

Other beta customers include the state of Michigan, the city of Melrose, Mass.; and Planview. The question is how many of VMware’s roughly 500,000 customers will move onto the service too, rather than keep using IaaS providers such as Amazon (a amzn) Web Services for certain applications, as some customers have.

There could also be friction with existing VMware cloud partners. They have been underwhelmed by the offering and the service provider partners not selected to host the offering now feel they are competing with their supplier, as my colleague Barb Darrow has noted.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

This story was updated Wednesday with corrected pricing charts from VMware. The company originally posted to its website different pricing models for storage and bandwidth. Additionally, a sentence about the lack of information about storage and network prices was removed.

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The topic arose at the clouderati-filled Cloud 2020 meetup in Las Vegas last week (where someone suggested we’ll have a cloud duopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google) and it’s back in the public eye again this week with the general availability of Google Compute Engine. I think we might get an idea how the cloud computing market will play out by looking at the fast-food industry.

The analogy goes like this: Fast food restaurants offer their consumers essentially the same things as public clouds offer their customers – convenience, speed, standardization, flexibility and everything else that comes with not having to prepare a meal from scratch or deploy applications on physical gear. And if all anyone wanted was fast, cheap hamburgers, fries and maybe some sort of chicken sandwich, the more than 33,000 McDonald’s across the world would probably do the trick.

However, when I come to any major intersection in a big city (and even in some small towns), I usually see no less than two national fast food chains taking up corner real estate. If I drive a little down the road, I’ll likely see a few more, and possibly some regional chains thrown in, as well.

Not all hamburgers are created equal, it seems.

Why should cloud computing be any different? If all anyone wanted was a virtual server, they’d probably go with the omnipresent Amazon Web Services. But when features, price, security, network connectivity and related services come into play, it becomes easy to see why there’s such an appetite for more options.

Amazon is to McDonald’s as Google is to …

Amazon Web Services = McDonald’s and Yum Brands rolled into one: AWS is to the cloud what McDonald’s is to fast food. It was the first, it’s the biggest and it’s the best known. All things being equal, there would be no reason for anyone to go anywhere else for cloud computing because AWS delivers reasonable services at a fair price (sometimes downright cheap), is omnipresent and can pretty much handle whatever scale you throw at it.

Only, if we consider the virtual server the hamburger of public cloud, the object store the French fries and the cloud database a chicken sandwich, AWS starts to look like a lot more than just a McDonald’s. You might look at it more like Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. The Amazon platform is about far more than just machine images and some standard storage and database features. It has myriad services covering everything from configuration to big data, and they’re all designed to integrate tightly with one another — like one of those KFC/Taco Bell combination restaurants that dot the urban landscape.

AWS, like McDonald’s, is the undisputed champion. Source: Wikipedia Commons

Rackspace = Wendy’s: Wendy’s is the No. 2 fast-food franchise in the United States, a title I think Rackspace probably holds in the cloud space (although assessing cloud market share is a little more difficult than assessing fast-food market share). And much like Wendy’s places a premium on the quality of its products, Rackspace places a premium on the quality of its service. CEO Lanham Napier has gone so far as to say it’s “playing a different game” than Amazon.

What he means is that Rackspace doesn’t need to compete with AWS by constantly driving down prices because Rackspace customers value service and will pay for it. Maybe, but the company might take a hint from what’s happening with Wendy’s as it struggles to maintain its No. 2 status against a feisty Burger King that’s largely following the McDonald’s playbook. If market share is important, higher prices aren’t often the best recipe for maintaining it.

The Angry Whopper, like App Engine, probably isn’t for everyone.

Google = Burger King: That cloud version of Burger King nipping at Rackspace’s heels is Google. It already has all the standard fare in servers, storage and databases, but it’s also hipper than the rest (or at least it tries to be), it takes some chances on product design (sometimes to the love-it-or-hate-it extreme) and, like Burger King with the Whopper, what it does well, it does really well. In Google’s case, that’s perform at scale.

If Google keeps adding services and cutting the costs of everything, there’s no reason it can’t become the world’s No. 2 cloud provider — some have already bestowed that honor upon it — and maybe challenge AWS a decade down the road.

Microsoft = Arby’s: Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to market it otherwise, Windows Azure is still largely viewed as a cloud platform for running .NET applications and generally doing all things Windows. Not that that’s a bad thing — a lot of people really like Windows and, by many accounts, Windows Azure is a fine platform. It’s like going to Arby’s: the menu offers a lot of things, but you go for the roast beef.

Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma et al = In-N-Out Burger, Culvers, Five Guys et al: These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract.

Yes, In-N-Out is delicious — and that’s about the entire menu.

VMware = Del Taco: According to my colleage Barb Darrow, VMware’s new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will “be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware.” Del Taco sounds like a Mexican place but also has hamburgers, fries, shakes and even iced coffee. And I don’t know anyone who eats there.

OpenStack = Frozen French fries, or cheeseburger-flavored Doritos: It really depends on who you ask (some would even say it’s like kale). If you’re grilling burgers and cooking fries, you’re essentially trying to recreate the fast-food experience at home. On the bright side, when you’re making the hamburger patties and cooking the fries, you can control how much salt you add and ensure everyone who handles them washes their hands. It might turn out great, but it’s never really the same.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m beginning to suspect that OpenStack-based public clouds (of the non-Rackspace( rax) variety) will end up being a lot like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos. In name, they’re like cheeseburgers, but after a few bites you’re left saying, “Hey, Doritos doesn’t make cheeseburgers …”

Everyone else = everyone else: Even after all this, we’re still left a bunch of different cloud providers and a bunch of different fast food chains. You might compare the telcos to Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees in that they’re big and make money, but they’re pretty much non-factors in the grand scheme of things. Then there are your various web hosts and others, which might compare with some local chain restaurants. And different countries will certainly have their own cloud providers just like they have their own takes on fast food.

In the end, though, it’s just hard to see how cloud computing becomes a two-horse race any more than the fast-food industry is a two-horse race. Sure, there are three clear leaders (with No. 1 having a big lead), but there’s plenty of business to go around because aside from some core similarities, no two providers are the same. And as long as more applications are developed and need a cloud to call home, there will be developers and CIOs with very different ideas of what makes a cloud platform great.

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Now, VMware and Verizon Enterprise Solutions say their newly released VMware Horizon Mobile service eases that angst. The news comes two years after the effort, called Project Horizon, was first announced. Two new VMware-ready phones — the Motorola Razr and LG Intuition — will run the new service with additional “VMware Horizon”-ready devices to come. And these devices running this service will bring fulfill “dual persona” promisew which segregates work email and access to applications from Twitter and Facebook.

According to the press release, those devices running in VMware Horizon Mobile environments provide:

” …  a corporate workspace that is controlled and managed by IT, and is completely separate from the employee’s personal information, applications and data on the device. The workspace contains its own operating system, applications and policies, enabling IT to remotely manage the entire lifecycle of the workspace. IT is able to provision the workspace, deploy applications and monitor the flow of information to and from the workspace for security.”

According to a blog post VMware’s Srinivas Krishnamurti:

“Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).”

A perpetual license for the service costs $125 per user.

Ah, Angry Birds and truly secure corporate email in one small package. If these devices deliver as promised, that is the best of both worlds — although one might quibble at the lack of immediate support for iPhones or Samsung Galaxies –both hugely popular among business users.

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The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from original investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and individual investors including Mark Leslie, co-founder  of Veritas; John Thompson, former CEO of Symantec and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks. It brings total funding to about $27 million.

The company plans to use the cash to build out its enterprise support, sales and marketing staff and to add capabilities as the software heads for general availability. That should happen in about two months, company CEO Poojan Kumar said in an interview. There are about 30 employees now, with the goal to add 70 to 80 more in the next 9 to 12 months, he said.

“Enterprise software requires staffing and expertise,” he said. He should know — Kumar led Exadata development for Oracle and then headed up data products for VMware. His co-founder Satyam Vaghani was principal engineer at VMware, where he worked on the vSphere kernel and the clustered file system.

PernixData says its software-only approach makes a disruptive technology a non-disruptive install that will run with a company’s existing server and storage hardware, take all the server flash available and virtualize it into a shareable pool. The company’s goal is to become “the VMware of server-side flash.”

As more servers ship with on-board flash, there’s a desire to make the most of that resource — especially for tier 1 applications like database and ERP applications that have proven difficult to virtualize.

San Jose-based PernixData is early to this battle but it won’t be alone for long. It’s safe to say that legacy storage  and server players — ranging from EMC and NetApp to Hewlett-Packard and Dell, as well as flash storage players like Fusion-io and Violin Systems — are scrambling for traction here.

PernixData is betting that its product — now in beta at 50 companies — will beat them to market by a good two years and build from there.

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OpenNebula 4.0, codenamed Eagle, is important for several reasons. Firstly, it includes a complete redesign of the Sunstone cloud management interface and a bunch of new operations for managing virtual machines, such as system and disk snapshotting, capacity resizing and IPv6 support. Ceph is now supported, too.

Drop-in vCloud replacement

Perhaps most important, though, is OpenNebula 4.0′s enhanced support for VMware users. It’s more a case of testing and certification than new functionality as such, but, as OpenNebula Project director Ignacio Llorente told me, “now OpenNebula fits perfectly on a VMware-based data center:”

“A thorough plan was carried out to make life ‘easier’ to VMware technology savvy administrators at the time of using OpenNebula. The workflow of the day-to-day routine tasks that cloud administrators were supposed to undergo was revisited, and the common actions were polished to conform with the philosophy of VMware based infrastructures. One example: the ability to upload VMware disks using the Sunstone Web UI was tested, slightly changed and properly documented.

“Moreover, the documentation of VMware underwent an exhaustive revamp, to comply with VMware terminology and to close the gap between the two technologies. The most noticeable outcome of this is the storage model of an OpenNebula cloud based on VMware hypervisors. This storage model resembles that of the infrastructures using pure VMware tech. VMware administrators would appreciate the description in the documentation of the VMFS and NFS Datastores, which leverages the use of the Disk/LUN and Network File System storage types respectively in VMware.”

Thing is, while OpenNebula has traditionally been seen as a European, more mature counterpart to the AWS-aping likes of OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, these days it’s pitching itself more to enterprise users as an open-source alternative to vCloud that comes with lower costs and support for multiple hypervisors. Llorente said that, while most of the OpenNebula community is using KVM or Xen (drivers for which are also improved in the new version, incidentally), 70 percent of customers are using OpenNebula on VMware.

According to Llorente, this means the OpenNebula and OpenStack/CloudStack cloud models can happily coexist – and for evidence of this, he points to the fact that OpenStackers Dell and Cisco are happy OpenNebula users. Other users, by the way, range from CERN, Fermilab, the European Space Agency and NASA to BlackBerry, China Mobile, Telefonica and Akamai.

First OpenNebula Global Conference

The first OpenNebula Global Conference will take place in Berlin from September 24th through the 26th, the project announced in a blog post yesterday. According to Llorente, the aim is to “have a more technical conference” than the more vendor-ish OpenStack Summit.

“We’re trying to have a meeting point where the community users and developers, also partners and customers, can discuss issues about their deployments and the future roadmap,” he said. “China Mobile and BlackBerry have developed enhancements, so we would like to show them. It’s more a community event than a commercial event… we would prefer technical proposals to commercial proposals.”

Speaking of the community, Llorente added that the main focus for OpenNebula 4.2 would be the incorporation of the recently open-sourced OpenNebulaApps with enhancements such as automatic elasticity. These improvements are being funded by OpenNebula customers through the Fund a Feature program that kicked off in February, he said.

And on the subject of conferences, as mentioned above, we will be hosting our Structure:Europe event in London on 18-19 September. If you can’t wait until then to discuss these issues with those in the know, our Structure event will take place on 19-20 June in San Francisco — the panel on OpenStack in the enterprise should be particularly pertinent.

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I sat down with EMC SVP and CTO John Roese on Tuesday at the company’s annual EMC World conference to find out what’s up. Here’s what he had to say.

On three companies under one roof

While they’re technically three separate companies, EMC is really in control. It’s the majority shareholder in VMware and owns more than 60 percent of Pivotal, its new joint venture with VMware that includes the Greenplum, Pivotal Labs, SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Cetas business lines. When it comes to everyone working toward a common goal, Roese said, “The good news is that while there is independence, Joe Tucci is the chairman of all these companies.”

Roese calls himself the “gravitational center” of the three companies when it comes to technology. This is a reinvention of the CTO role at EMC, which used to be more of a research position. Now, he puts the stake in the ground and generally directs everyone toward it, even if they’re not all taking the same path to get there.

On why Pivotal happened and why it matters

My takeaway from Roese’s comments on formation of Pivotal is that Greenplum is really the linchpin of the whole company. At its core, Pivotal is about building big data infrastructure that can handle next-generation workloads, but it’s aware that broad adoption is only possible if that high technology becomes easier to consume. That means new higher-level applications, which is where SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs come into play.

All of this technically could have been accomplished by just selling Greenplum and Pivotal Labs (the only assets of the new company that was under the EMC umbrella) to VMware, but Roese said VMware wasn’t the right home because VMware is not so important in the places where next-generation workloads are popping up. There’s not a lot of VMware inside carriers’ data centers, he acknowledged, but there is a lot of OpenStack popping up. And there’s a lot of Amazon Web Services everywhere you look.

“We would like the big data infrastructure to not care about that,” Roese explained. From EMC’s perspective, it doesn’t need to own the middle — the cloud operating system, if you will — if it can still engage customers at the storage and application-platform layers.

On keeping independent while working an ‘unfair advantage’

Roese doesn’t think a vertically integrated approach is the best way to do business in today’s technology world, which is why EMC, VMware and Pivotal all operate independently and no one relies on another in order to work within customers’ data centers. That’s why VMware has its own cloud computing efforts but Pivotal is cloud-agnostic, why EMC storage can operate with any higher-level software and why VMware doesn’t care about what’s running underneath or, usually, above it.

However, he added, it’s only natural the three companies seek an “unfair advantage” from the incestuous bonds they share. What he means, of course, is that they should keep a close eye on what the others are doing and work together to ensure they’re all optimized for the same types of workloads. For example, Roese said, if EMC didn’t reconsider how storage had to perform given that virtualization is the norm or that technology like Hadoop exists, it would “become suboptimal or generic.”

The same holds true for Pivotal and VMware. Pivotal needs to think about how big data applications run on virtualized resources differently than on big bare metal systems, as well as on flash-based arrays like what EMC is about to roll out based on its XtremIO acquisition. VMware and EMC need to think about how their software-defined data center and software-defined storage approaches can build off each other.

From EMC’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this all matters. It is at its core an information infrastructure company, but “the challenging thing with that is that it’s a moving target,” Roese said. A company like EMC can’t get by on storage arrays alone anymore, but it also can’t be dumb enough to think it can be everything to everyone and still be good at anything.

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VMware is charting its course using its virtualization prowess and Nicira’s software-defined networking, which it bought last year. It’s no surprise that VMware parent and storage leader EMC is pinning its strategy on software-defined storage technology that it’s calling ViPR.

The first software deliverables — and it’s all software built by a team led by Amitabh Srivastava, the former Microsoft cloud exec who joined EMC in 2011 – will be outlined Monday at EMC World in Las Vegas. But, here’s how Jeremy Burton, EMC’s CMO and executive vice president, outlined the plan for me on Friday.

First: A new control plane will let admins manage physical assets, including storage arrays, to create virtual arrays and storage pools and then provision them and make them available in a service catalog for users, Burton said. EMC likens the software to a universal remote control that can operate multiple devices. For most storage, ViPR will discover what storage assets are available and allow provisioning. And if there is “smart” storage available, it will offload processing to that array to handle the data path.

Second: A new data plane will initially focus on data objects — at first those stored in Amazon’s S3 by the third quarter and then  HDFS by year’s end, Burton said. ViPR data services will also support OpenStack Swift-compatible REST APIs as well as existing EMC Atmos and VNX storage and even storage from rival NetApp, Burton said.

From the press release: “For traditional workloads that utilize file and block [storage], EMC ViPR steps out of the way and lets the underlying array fulfill the role of Data Plane.” But for new web-scale, big data applications, it provides Object Data Services, which is where the support Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift REST APIs and HDFS access methods comes in. Of course it will support existing NFS and iSCSI protocols that drive much of enterprise storage now. That heterogeneous  support means that customers can, depending on the workload type, configure their services as they see fit without necessarily  having to worry about what storage is under the covers.

IDC analyst Vernon Turner said EMC ViPR is about much more than “storage virt.” Instead, it “takes many of the elements needed to create the software-defined data center [including] wide-spread orchestration — so it can properly deliver cloud services.’

EMC, which made its fortune selling big, expensive storage hardware, has shown a willingness to cannibalize its own business before others can eat it for them. Burton said the design point was cloud, and the first targeted companies will be service providers, he said. “The design goal is no single point of failure … and ability to scale out,” he said. Service providers, including telcos and big hosting companies, are looking for ways to stave off incursions into their businesses by insurgents, especially Amazon Web Services.

Asked if EMC/VMware spinout Pivotal will use the new software as a foundational technology, Burton said the “Let me just say that Paul Maritz is one of Amitabh’s best friends right now.”

Maritz, who is Pivotal’s CEO, “wants a cheap massively scalable store for what he’s building,” Burton said. “I think Paul’s mission is to be cloud-agnostic but he also believes HDFS will be foundational layer and we intend to be primary provider of that layer.”

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Two years ago, VMware purchased WaveMaker and its technology for simplifying the construction of enterprise Java applications and made it part of its SpringSource business unit. As GigaOM’s Derrick Harris wrote at the time, Rod Johnson, who was then head of that business, said Wavemaker made sense because:

” … applications developed with it actually are Spring applications. That means VMware can tightly align WaveMaker and Spring developments to make WaveMaker an even more fulfilling experience, and after simple applications are built using WaveMaker, an organization’s Spring developers can go in and code away to make it work even better. When it comes to developing Java applications, VMware now has something for almost everybody, and it all works together at some level.”

The mystery here is that SpringSource and associated technologies were spun off to the VMware-EMC-founded Pivotal startup. Why WaveMaker was not included is unclear to me. I’ve pinged Pivotal for comment and will update with a response. And…. here’s that response from a Pivotal spokeswoman:

“Pivotal is focused on bringing a new platform to market based on Spring, Cloud Foundry and Hadoop. We have significant investments in these technologies, and believe that WaveMaker customers are best served by a dedicated effort from Pramati.”

Pramati co-founder and president Vijay Pullur said former Wavemaker exec Michael Harper is with his company, which is expanding into cloud infrastructure. WaveMaker technologies could play a roll in an upcoming cloud venture, he said. We’ll be talking about projects like this and what’s new in cloud computing at Structure 2013 in San Francisco in June.

According to the press release announcing the news:

 ”WaveMaker applications are cloud-ready, highly scalable, multi-device, and backed by a strong developer community that has doubled to 35,000 active monthly users over the last two years. With its long heritage of mission-critical Java application development, Pramati expects to accelerate this growth going forward.”

In other words: stay tuned.

This story was updated at 7:04 p.m. PST with Pivotal comment.

This story

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