EMC and VMware’s Pivotal Moment

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.

VMworld from an Open Source Perspective

VMworld is clearly the largest dedicated virtualization conference, and yet from an Open Source perspective it is slightly disappointing because the VMware ecosystem naturally attracts proprietary software vendors, and also some of the more interesting activities in Open Source are through multi-vendor foundations which do not have the same marketing budgets as vendors themselves.

Nevertheless, there are a number of key Open Source players, and some interesting smaller players, represented at VMworld.

VMware Spring + Google: Dramatic PaaS Progress and New SMT Concerns

Java based applications can now be moved between not only a SpringSource TC-Server Java platform on VMware vSphere, but also between the same platform on VMForce, and now Google AppEngine. This level of support from VMware, Salesforce.com, and now Google is starting to make SpringSource look like the early leading technology for PaaS Clouds. This is a significant advance in the state of PaaS clouds as there were previously no examples that offered such broad support for one platform by such a diverse set of industry leaders. However as is always the case, platform advances have outstripped security, management and performance assurance capabilities.