If you were to ask EMC or VMware whom they
consider their major threat and competition you’d be easily forgiven for being
mistaken to think it was NetApp, HP or offerings such as Hyper-V. With many
terming us to now be in the third era of corporate computing, with mainframe
and the client/server being the first two, the current cloud era has
undoubtedly been spearheaded by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook. It is
here where EMC and VMware face their biggest challenge of remaining relevant
and cutting edge in a market that demands automation, simplicity and speed of
deployment. Despite major marketing campaigns of “Big Data” and “Clouds” that
have seen airports littered with exorbitant amounts of posters and adverts, as
well as numerous acquisitions of various companies that have extended already
huge product portfolios, both EMC and VMware have struggled to release
themselves from the shackles of being deemed just a Storage and Hypervisor
company. So in light of this it’s no surprise to see both companies spin off a
new and independent venture that will address this very challenge, namely the
Pivotal Initiative.
With a promise of $400 million in investments
and a 69 / 31 % split in ownership between EMC and VMware respectively, the
Pivotal Initiative will be headed by none other than VMware’s ex-CEO Paul
Maritz. At the time his stepping down from that position raised a few eyebrows
and questions as to whether he was being demoted, prepped for early retirement
or was just being pushed to make way for VMware’s current CEO, Pat Gelsinger.
In hindsight one could easily see this now as a move that maybe Maritz himself
initiated from his own recognition that VMware as a company was failing to
transition yet alone be recognized as a PaaS organisation.
Maritz like most in the industry would have
recognised that with ever increasing data sets and ever increasing scale, the
need for automation, rapid application development and deployment is quickly
breaking beyond the capabilities of traditional man managed infrastructures
that have previously been offered by EMC and VMware. Moreover both VMware
and EMC know it’s all about applications and specifically big data applications.
For VMware and EMC to succeed in having the de facto platform of the IT
industry, it’s key they win the war to host these new and integral
applications. To address this EMC and VMware went about acquiring just about
every relevant start up or product that could possibly address this challenge
from GemStone, GreenPlum to SpringSource. Despite this huge purchasing spree
and VMware’s push to develop vFabric and create the PaaS initiative Cloud
Foundry both EMC and VMware have struggled to gain market recognition as true
Cloud and PaaS players.
One of the key aspects challenging EMC and
VMware’s recognition as a Cloud and PaaS offering has ironically been the very
thing they drove to try and solve it i.e. the incredible rate of acquisitions
and consequent increase in product portfolios. With sales and presales teams
that had been accustomed for years to successfully pitching and selling storage
arrays and hypervisor licenses, the demand on them was now to understand new
and alien concepts of Big Data analytics, PaaS, application development, SaaS
etc and also address a customer base they were not accustomed to. Now by having
Maritz head up a brand new and independent company that can essentially take
the appropriate products from those portfolios, the opportunity is to establish
brand new and focused sales, technical and post sales teams that understand
applications, big data etc. as well as have the right level of existing
relations within their potential client base.
So what is the Pivotal Initiative actually
bringing new to the table in terms of products? Well not much actually. In fact
what it does bring is a much needed cohesion between what have now been a
multitude of disparate acquisitions and products that have failed to gain the
market share their technical and business benefits certainly deserve.
Firstly there’s the platform that will be
based on EMC’s Greenplum appliance integrated with Pivotal HD, the data
querying system that works with Hadoop. The Greenplum appliance is based on the
open source PostgreSQL, which is a full ANSI-standard relational database
system and has performance benchmarks with Hadoop’s parallel system that are
already impressive. With the soon to be released Pivotal HD product from the
Pivotal Labs group, the aim is to conduct even more queries against even larger
data sets.
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| Pivotal Initiative: The products may look familiar but only this time there's cohesion and focus |
From a VMware perspective, there’s the
inclusion of Gemfire to serve as the caching layer with its capability of
quickly ingesting events via its in-memory data management system. Then there’s
Cetas that provides rapid analytics atop the Hadoop platform and is designed
for the elasticity of virtual resources with specific focus on not only vSphere
but also Amazon Web Services. Additionally and most interestingly is the
addition of the Cloud Foundry PaaS, which was initially built to run on
VMware’s proprietary system. This time it comes with the promise that it will
be an abstraction layer with application automation for cross clouds enabling
Pivotal to be hosted on the likes of Amazon Web Services' EC2. Coupling this
with SpringSource’s Java application development framework to enable
integration with legacy data sources and applications and the Pivotal Labs’ ability
for facilitating rapid coding, the objective is a focused approach and aim at
the jugular of online and enterprise analytics.
The Pivotal Initiative will aim to deliver
the market a data analysis platform capable of capturing large volumes of data,
quickly addressing and querying it and then producing near real time answers
that can be stored in a large scale-out storage system. It would be naïve to
think this is an initiative aimed just at existing VMware customers. This is an
attempt to not only enter but also become relevant in the software led
infrastructure arena that competes with the likes of Amazon.
In essence the Pivotal Initiative is a brave
yet necessary move from both EMC and VMware to embrace the challenge of change
as the legacy of traditional infrastructure faces the daunting prospect of new
software paradigms. Whether the Pivotal Initiative can be successful and
achieve it’s $1bn rate in its projected five years depends on a number of
factors. One thing is certain is that the first challenge to remaining relevant
in the IT industry is to acknowledge and adapt to change. The masters behind
the Pivotal Initiative have already achieved that.
