Pivotal PaaS: Opening up the era of industrial internet big Data

When Paul Maritz was about to step down as VMware's chief executive, he had this candid assessment of VMware: "Unless we are forward-looking, we will be seen as the end of the client-server era, not the beginning of the next era."

Maritz's "opening" began with the official release of pivotal last month. The new joint venture, led by Maritz, includes EMC, VMware and GE, which will inject $105 million trillion.

Pivotal is an interesting start-up, with a large proportion of 1250 employees coming from EMC and VMware acquisitions, including Cetas,cloud Foundry,gemfire??,greenplum and SpringSource, and Pivotal Labs, a high-end web and mobile development studio. In the "less than six months" time, this "Basterds" plan to launch pivotal one, an enterprise-class PAAs (Platform-service) platform, to provide large data analysis, and eventually hooked on the "Internet of things."

You might think that only a wide variety of talents and technologies will take half a year to complete integration. But to my surprise, Maritz, with the help of EMC, Greenplum, Pivotal Labs and SpringSource technical executives, has laid out a nose-and-eye pattern for the "next generation" of enterprise applications.

Cloud？ Who cares-everything is on the platform

The first thing to know is that pivotal is not a cloud product in the traditional sense. It simply assumes that the cloud infrastructure is under the pivotal one PAAs, and that the infrastructure is Amazon's public cloud, OpenStack's private cloud, or any VMware cloud.

Speaking of the Cloud "platform", it needs to be clear what is it? What's it going to be based on? Who's going to build it? And why?

The composition of the Pivotal one platform is simple: the Cloud foundry and the Spring Java Framework provide the foundation for a wide range of large data technologies as service offerings.

What will be built on this platform is a large data backend for large web and mobile applications, at least in the short term. Currently, a large chunk of the big data market lies in the UI effectiveness analysis of popular social networks, E-commerce sites, and mobile applications-based on advanced user behavior analysis, to identify any given time to present web ads to consumers.

Put it together with the pivotal Lab Development Studio--that is, designing and developing public-facing web and mobile apps for startups and mature businesses--and not just what pivotal one will be, And how pivotal is going to pursue a large business in the future with technology.

More and more it consumption has shifted from internal it to the public-facing outsourced application solutions provided by professional organizations. Today, developers of these institutions are the largest users of PAAs products, and enterprise developers are not. Therefore, it is easy to guess in the short term, pivotal labs-no matter which pivotal-trained professional service provider-will develop the "next generation" of large data applications for their corporate clients on pivotal one, rather than letting enterprise developers use their own pivotal.

Seriously, do you want corporate developers to design UI for consumer mobile apps? Are you going to send them to school to learn the skills of Hadoop so that you can analyze and optimize your e-commerce operations, or contract with a professional vendor for support? The sad truth is that corporate it is lagging behind in these areas, even as they try to hire talent.

Of course, this does not prevent pivotal from deciding to create a way for enterprise developers to take advantage of these new technologies through the languages and tools they already know, without having to learn the latest programming paradigm. In such solutions, Pivotal's HAWQ, a Hadoop SQL engine, can play an important role. At the very least, Maritz clearly points out that data integration simplification between applications built on pivotal one and back-end systems in the enterprise would be a high priority.

Larger large data

Large data backend for external Web/mobile applications running in the cloud-whether private or public-a key application model is moving forward. However, the Web, mobile click Stream, or GPS coordinates are not all large data.

A larger large data source will be telemetry from the so-called "industrial Internet". This is where 105 million of dollars of investment comes from GE.

GE, which demonstrated its big data plan last November, Immelt, GE chief executive, published an article in Gigaom about GE's initiative to embed sensors in its vast industrial equipment, from wind turbines to jet engines to locomotives to electronic medical devices. Large data analysis optimizes the operation of these devices by handling telemetry data transmitted by the sensor, provides new services, and provides feedback on design improvements. In the article, Immelt boldly predicted that "by 2030, the industrial internet revolution will bring about 15 trillion U.S. dollars in global GDP growth." ”

GE announces that pivotal will be an "important partner" to help GE manage and analyze data from its industrial equipment and "use it to support our employees and customers". 105 million dollars, Pivotal's 10% stake, compared to a 150 billion dollar company, especially as it has identified a 15 trillion dollar market opportunity, and launched an industrial Internet Software center with hundreds of engineers in Ramon, California, seems like a small bet.

Still, there will be lots and lots of betting around the endless internet of things. Interestingly, GE has not courted this leader, IBM, which launched the "Smart Earth" initiative nearly five years ago.

Prospects

You must give Maritz trust. The seemingly chaotic takeover, which has made him an enterprise embracing large data, PAAs and Internet of things, is no doubt the hottest High-tech area. In addition, service-mode companies, such as pivotal, address an important aspect of it consumerism: companies moving to external suppliers rather than trying to drive internal it.

It is almost impossible to hinder the prospects of pivotal, a company with long-term ambitions. Many things will depend on Maritz, as he is visionary in bringing so much technology and organic stitching into the corporate culture. This will require real leadership to sustain.

When I interviewed Maritz two years ago, he was fighting over how the VMware cloud spanned the gap from server virtualization to a new wave of native cloud applications, when the road map was not clear. The launch of pivotal shows that he has come a long way to sharpen this vision, although he needs to create a new company that will provide a new "vehicle" for his journey.

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)