Understanding The Significance Of Dell’s Acquisition Of EMC And The Emergence Of Dell Technologies

Dell and EMC intend to finalize the transaction whereby Dell acquires EMC on September 7, 2016. Under the terms of the acquisition, Dell and its owners Michael Dell, MSD Partners and Silver Lake, will acquire EMC Corporation. Meanwhile, EMC spin-off VMware will continue as a publicly traded company. The announcement to finalize Dell’s acquisition of EMC comes head on the heels of the receipt of regulatory approval for the transaction by China’s Ministry of Commerce after 98% of EMC shareholders approved the transaction on July 19. As a result of the merger of the two companies, EMC shareholders stand to receive $24.05 per share in addition to a tracking stock that represents their equity in VMware.  The newly created company, Dell Technologies, will operate immediately after the transaction is finalized. Dell’s acquisition of EMC signals the emergence of the “largest privately-controlled, integrated technology company” as noted in a press release. The confluence of Dell’s expertise in hardware and technology solutions for small businesses to mid-size organizations with EMC’s experience with enterprise customers, cloud computing solutions and security solutions means that Dell Technologies stands poised to benefit from the complementary synergies specific to the union of the two companies. The union of Dell and EMC promises to offer customers of Dell Technologies a rich portfolio of private cloud and big data solutions that draws upon an EMC corporate umbrella that includes Pivotal, Virtustream and VMware.

Expect the convergence of Dell’s experience with hardware and its relationship to small to mid-market companies, in conjunction with EMC’s storage, networking, cloud computing, big data and security solutions to enable Dell Technologies to offer enterprise-grade private cloud solutions geared toward the needs of small to mid-tier organizations as well as enterprises. Given EMC’s ownership of Pivotal and its concomitant specialties in big data analytics and the internet of things, the Dell-EMC merger has the potential to reshape the cloud computing landscape by giving Dell Technologies leadership in the hybrid cloud space while claiming Pivotal’s specialties in big data analytics and RSA’s suite of security solutions as further, notable feathers in its cap. Overall, the landscape for hybrid cloud computing stands to gain another significant player that has the means to tap into Dell’s relationships with small to mid-size companies that are increasingly ramping up their transition to the hybrid cloud. Moreover, with Pivotal under its wing, Dell Technologies promises to democratize big data and internet of things analytics by spearheading big adoption and developing progressively turnkey approaches to big data analysis. The implications of the Dell-EMC merger for the cloud computing landscape are huge, particularly in light of Rackspace’s recent acquisition by Apollo Global Management and the subsequent opportunity created in the private cloud market while Apollo Global Management and Rackspace recalibrate their long-term strategy.

Pivotal Embraces Hortonworks Hadoop Distribution While Hortonworks Commits To Supporting Pivotal’s Hadoop Native SQL Platform

On April 12, Hortonworks and Pivotal announced a deepening of their strategic relationship as major players in the space for commercial Hadoop distributions and Big Data analytics. Pivotal will standardize its Hadoop distribution on Pivotal HDP, a platform that is identical to the Hortonworks Data Platform. Meanwhile, Hortonworks will offer Pivotal’s SQL on Hadoop platform, Pivotal HDB, as an offering within its own portfolio under the branding Hortonworks HDB. Powered by Apache HAWQ, Hortonworks HDB will be identical to Pivotal HBD and conversely illustrates Hortonwork’s standardization on a Pivotal technology as a counterpoint to Pivotal’s embrace of the Hortonworks Data Platform as its core Hadoop distribution. The expanded collaboration between Pivotal and Hortonworks means that Pivotal aligns with one of the industry’s most widely used Hadoop distributions in the form of Hortonworks. Hortonworks, on the other hand, now can brand and offer professional services for Pivotal’s Hadoop Native SQL platform in ways that give it parity with Cloudera’s Impala. The deepening of the partnership between Pivotal and Hortonworks promises to complicate the battle for Hadoop distribution supremacy by giving Hortonworks enhanced access to Pivotal’s renowned big data application development and analytics capabilities. As such, the real winner here is Hortonworks, although Pivotal stands to gain from standardizing on HDP and thereby enabling it to focus on its core strengths in analytics and application development.

Latest Release Of Pivotal Cloud Foundry Features Support For Core Netflix OSS Components Through Spring Cloud Services

Pivotal today announced a new release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry marked by integrated micro-services with Spring Cloud Services, support for .NET applications, Beta support for Docker images and deeper integrations with application lifecycle management vendors. Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s integration of Spring Cloud Services empowers developers to build microservices architectures into their cloud applications by leveraging the platform for microservice-based distributed systems that Netflix open sourced after extensive production-grade usage. Pivotal Cloud Foundry brings opinionated provisioning and lifecycle management to Spring Cloud Services, thereby enabling customers to maximally derive business value from the implementation of a microservice-based infrastructure. The new release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry also features native support for .NET applications, thereby allowing organizations to create cloud-based infrastructures featuring both Linux and Windows machines. This release also allows developers to deploy Docker images to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform as well as to take advantage of partnerships with application lifecycle management vendors such as GitLab, CloudBees and JFrog. Moreover, Pivotal Cloud Foundry now supports Microsoft Azure in early access mode, thereby expanding its roster of available partnerships with the cloud infrastructures of Amazon Web Services, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Air and OpenStack. Today’s release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry reinforces Cloud Foundry’s undisputed leadership position in the Platform as a Service space and continues the embellishment of its impressive array of PaaS functionalities. Given the contemporary proliferation of distributed applications and architectures, Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s integration with Spring Cloud Services represents a highly significant enhancement that empowers customers to build self-healing, distributed systems. Expect Pivotal Cloud Foundry to deepen its dominance within the PaaS landscape as the platform continues to differentiate itself from the pack by means of progressively sophisticated and powerful capabilities that its platform delivers both to its customers and the cloud computing landscape at large.

Pivotal and Mirantis Partner To Deliver Pivotal Cloud Foundry On Mirantis OpenStack

Pivotal and Mirantis recently announced a partnership whereby Pivotal will support deployments of Pivotal Cloud Foundry on the Mirantis OpenStack platform. Meanwhile, Mirantis will resell Pivotal Cloud Foundry to its IaaS customers. The partnership between Pivotal and Mirantis reinforces the integration between OpenStack and Cloud Foundry by bringing together two leading open source technologies in the cloud computing space and delivering a full stack marked by infrastructure provisioning and management capabilities in addition to agile application development functionality. As noted in a Pivotal blog post, customers can deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Mirantis OpenStack by following a runbook that streamlines its deployment. The collaboration between Pivotal and Cloud Foundry underscores the ascendancy of open source cloud computing technologies that are predicated upon transparent governance frameworks and the contributions of developers and organizations from all over the world. By offering Pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of Mirantis OpenStack, Pivotal and Mirantis render available an on demand solution that absolves companies of the hassle of integrating an application development platform into an infrastructure deployment. The partnership gives Mirantis the feather in its cap constituted by an enterprise-grade PaaS in the form of Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Correspondingly, Pivotal benefits from the increased sales channel exposure enabled by access to Mirantis customers. The real winner from this partnership, however, is OpenStack insofar as it continues to cement its reputation for having the ability to integrate with major PaaS, database and Big Data technologies as recently exemplified by the agreement between Oracle regarding its Database as a Service and Mirantis, and Piston Cloud’s announcement of Piston OS 4.0.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry Extends Its Reach With Support For Amazon Web Services

Today, Pivotal announces that Pivotal Web Services will render Pivotal Cloud Foundry available in conjunction with Amazon Web Services as its hosted infrastructure. By making Pivotal Cloud Foundry available via a virtual appliance that supports its deployment on Amazon Web Services, Pivotal extends its support for IaaS platforms that currently include VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Air and OpenStack. As a result of its support of Amazon Web Services, Pivotal embraces the creation of hybrid cloud infrastructures for Cloud Foundry that feature a combination of VMware or OpenStack-based on premise environments as well as Amazon’s famed public cloud infrastructure. In addition to its availability via one-click integration with Amazon Web Services, Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available as an Amazon Machine Image in the AWS Marketplace. The screenshot below illustrates Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s integration with Amazon Web Services alongside a bevy of other integrations and tools for managing a Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment:

Pivotal Cloud Foundry Ops Manager with AWS Tile

Now generally available, Pivotal Web Services with Enterprise support manages an AWS instance on behalf of the customer, thereby absolving customers of the challenge of managing the AWS environment as it scales and morphs in relation to the demands of application and data ingestion.

James Watters, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platform Group at Pivotal, remarked on the significance of today’s announcement as follows:

With the latest Pivotal Cloud Foundry release, Pivotal becomes the first major middleware vendor to include managed public cloud capacity in a software subscription at no additional cost. By offering hosted public cloud along with dedicated self-install on either public or private clouds, Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides the instant-on affordable capacity Line of Business (LOB) executives need with the robust security and automation features IT can also bring to private clouds. With today’s release, LOB and IT can finally agree on a single platform.

Here, Watters notes how Pivotal includes support for Amazon Web Services in a Cloud Foundry subscription at no additional cost. Moreover, by supporting a private cloud, Watters remarks on how Pivotal delivers enhanced operational agility to Line of Business teams that may have an interest in leveraging a public cloud for development purposes in advance of the decision to transport their applications back to the on premise environments specific to their organization. All told, Pivotal’s support of Amazon Web Services for its Cloud Foundry distribution aptly exemplifies the quintessence of Pivotal’s mission of enhancing enterprise agile application development by means of cutting edge technologies at the nexus of cloud computing and application development. In addition, Pivotal’s support of AWS for Pivotal Cloud Foundry dramatically enhances the potential for Cloud Foundry-based application portability and moves the needle of cloud native application development toward enhanced interoperability and the adoption of open standards for contemporary computing.

AWS Innovator Benjamin Black Joins Pivotal To Lead Internet of Things Lab

Benjamin Black, one of the key resources behind the concept and implementation of Amazon Web Services, joined Pivotal Cloud Foundry as Senior Director of Technology in late February. Black collaborated with Chris Pinkham to write the proposal to build Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) platform that was subsequently approved by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In his new role at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Black will lead an Internet of Things lab in Seattle that represents the cusp of Pivotal’s thought leadership about IoT data aggregation and analytics. After leading an engineering team at Amazon Web Services, Black worked at Microsoft before becoming CEO and Founder of Boundary. Black’s addition to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry team constitutes the latest of high profile hires including Joshua McKenty, former CEO of Piston Cloud Computing and OpenStack co-founder and Andrew Clay Shafer, co-founder of Puppet Labs. The announcement of Black’s hire comes head on the heels of Pivotal’s decision to open source its Big Data Suite and enter into a strategic partnership with Hortonworks. Pivotal is a spinoff of EMC and VMware that aims to drive a transformation of contemporary IT by bringing the power of cloud computing, Big Data, agile application development and real-time analytics to the modern enterprise.