Pivotal, the company spun out of EMC and VMware on April 1, formally announced its launch on Wednesday, unveiling a truly grand plan. In fact, if you consider all the components and ambitions, you might conclude the plan is either brilliant or crazy.
The need for Pivotal’s promised “next-generation enterprise computing platform” starts with the premise that there has been a fundamental shift in IT, with Internet consumer giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon pioneering large-scale data-management approaches and rapid application-development capabilities supported by unprecedented levels of automation.
These approaches have yet to effectively reach the vast majority of companies and government agencies still mostly dependent on client-server applications built on relational databases and even mainframes, said Paul Maritz, Pivotal’s CEO. What’s needed, he said, is a next-era platform that can integrate with those legacy technologies.