EMC and VMware are forming a new joint business unit, the Pivotal Initiative, with EMC chief strategy officer Paul Maritz as its head. It will include 1,400 employees, 600 from VMware and 800 from EMC. Maritz is the former CEO of VMware.

The joint entity will take a combination of open source code and proprietary code owned by the two companies and combine it into a software stack designed to engage developers building next-generation cloud applications, a goal that’s in the long-term interests of both companies, according to a blog posted on the initiative.

Included will be a key piece of VMware’s vCloud Suite called vFabric, which provides application data caching and deployment capabilities; also, the Spring lightweight Java development framework and VMware’s open source Cloud Foundry development hosting service. They can be combined with the analytics capabilities of EMC’s Greenplum open source data warehouse. At the same time, other parts of the VMware’s vCloud Suite, such as vCloud Director for orchestrating pooled resources, remained off the agenda.
Network Computing