EMC and VMware’s pivotal moment has officially spun off and the Pivotal Initiative, a big data and cloud platform company is slated to go public according to EMC CEO Joe Tucci while speaking with investors at an event in New York. EMC’s chief strategist and ex-CEO of VMware, Paul Maritz, who is leading the Pivotal Initiative, believes and expects it to be a billion dollar business within the next five years if they can get the $400 million initial investment needed to reach that goal. EMC will own 69 percent and VMware will own 31 percent with 1,250 employees and $300 million in revenue.
What the Pivotal Initiative brings to the game is Greenplum’s parallel query and data processing strengths as well as Gemfire’s ability to rapidly ingest and process lots and lots of events. Application development and deployments will come from Cloud Foundary and will be using Spring’s Java application development framework. This collection of assets from both EMC and VMware are not quite fully cohesive yet but the pieces looks like they will really fit together quite well.
It is not very often when you can see a startup with such great potential for development of cloud and big data technology. This initiative simply combines some of VMware’s non-core technology for building platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings and combining it with EMC’s big data technology. The Pivotal Initiative has already release and unveiled Pivotal HD which is a new Apache Hadoop big data distribution that moves Hadoop queries from the batch jobs and into an interactive process to make them as easy as a SQL database query. During the VMworld 2012 keynote, you might remember the Hadoop demos that were presented that you could say started to foreshadow what is coming.
Although the initiative is active and already moving, come April 1st the Pivotal Initiative will become known as just Pivotal and by the second half of 2013, Pivotal has plans to release the Pivotal Platform, which combines the six components of the initiative in to the platform. I believe this is a bold and incredibly smart move for EMC and VMware. They get to offload some technology, like Cloud Foundry for example and put the pieces together in another company that has a chance or true potential to really create something wonderful but they will still have issues tying all the pieces together. I think they have the talent, or will acquire them, and Paul Maritz will be the right one to take this initiative off and running and believe he will make the billion dollar company in the five years projected.
Very exciting time for the technology, as well as another possible IPO, that will be well worth watching and or possibly getting onboard with. If Pivotal does follow the path that EMC and VMware hope and does eventually go public, would we need to consider renaming EMC from EMC2 to EMC3 as part of this Pivotal moment?