Tag: Paul Maritz

Pivotal Extends Mobile Capabilities With Acquisition Of Xtreme Labs

Pivotal announced the acquisition of Xtreme Labs, a Toronto-based mobile development and consulting firm on Wednesday. The acquisition complements Pivotal’s cloud and big data platforms by expanding Pivotal’s mobile capabilities and extending the reach of its emerging, behemoth technology platform even further. Pivotal, recall, is a platform as a service based on the Cloud Foundry project that additionally boasts big data capabilities related to the acquisition of Greenplum by its parent company EMC. The acquisition of Xtreme Labs “aligns with Pivotal’s strategy to capitalize on the nexus of converging forces in the industry” and illustrates the seriousness of its intent to build a technology platform called Pivotal One that brings the computing power had by Amazon Web Services, Facebook and Google to the enterprise. Specifically, the acquisition of Xtreme Labs positions Pivotal to build a technology platform marked by the convergence of cloud, big data, mobile and social media applications.

In an April webcast announcing the launch of Pivotal One, Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz remarked on the divide between the IT infrastructures had by select internet giants and traditional enterprise IT. Maritz noted that Amazon Web Services, Facebook and Google excel at storing massive amounts of data, extracting actionable business intelligence from that data, rapidly developing software applications and automating routine procedures. Pivotal One intends to deliver a platform as a service that democratizes the data storage, data analytics and agile application development capabilities currently held by a handful of internet giants to enterprise IT more generally. Recently, Pivotal has made news through strategic partnerships with Piston Cloud to refine the integration of OpenStack with Cloud Foundry, and IBM to develop the governance for Cloud Foundry. Terms of the acquisition of Xtreme Labs were not disclosed although AllThingsD reports Pivotal paid $65 million in cash.

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Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller Responds To Paul Maritz’s Vision Of The Current State Of Enterprise IT

CEO of PaaS provider Apprenda Sinclair Schuller recently responded to Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz’s elaboration of the vision of Pivotal and Pivotal One by noting that Apprenda already provides the data-centric infrastructure and agile application development environment that Pivotal proposes to deliver in 9-18 months. Schuller’s larger point here is that the future which Maritz envisions for the enterprise has arrived insofar as customers such as JPMorgan, Chase and AmerisourceBergen are already leveraging Apprenda’s PaaS platform to develop “data-centric cloud applications.” Schuller argues that Maritz positions Pivotal One around a “future vision that is not really the future, but is the current market reality” as follows:

At Apprenda, we’ve been focused on the fact that enterprises need a PaaS that helps them tackle modern architectures, data-centric workloads, and rapid development for years. Waiting for Pivotal’s vision to turn into products means that CIOs are leaving money on the table because Apprenda is already there, and we’ve been there. The world Maritz describes, as “the future” exists today, and our customers are reaping the benefits of working with a company that has been espousing and backing that vision for years.

Pivotal joining us in this vision validates the vision we’ve had all along, but watch over the next 18 months as we move on to the next phase of enterprise IT’s monumental shift to a services model.
Yesterday, Paul Maritz unveiled more details around the Pivotal Initiative and their platform for the enterprise. It’s interesting to hear Maritz position around a future vision that is not really the future, but is the current market reality that leads customers to choose Apprenda because we fulfilled this vision before anyone in the market. Let me explain.

Our customers have bought into this vision today, and are executing with an enterprise PaaS that is driving IT efficiency and equipping CIOs to deliver on helping the business build innovative applications. Companies like JPMorgan Chaseand Diebold leverage Apprenda exactly this way. Organizations like AmerisourceBergen have written data-centric cloud applications that are used to manage the intricacies of oncology practices and patient care, and have built those applications 33 percent faster with developers that are now twice as productive. This is how innovation is powered.

Schuller’s remarks beg the question regarding the current state of enterprise IT with respect to its ability to store massive amounts of data and develop applications and iteratively respond to that data in real-time. The reality is that while some enterprises have clearly embarked down the road of building scalable IT infrastructures that support agile application development and data analytics, a significant percentage of enterprises continues to wrestle with basic IT infrastructure issues such as building scalable infrastructures to support continued growth and the challenge of consolidating siloed data into a centralized enterprise data warehouse repository, let alone running advanced data analytics and building applications that respond to the specificities of real-time data feeds. Nevertheless, the Apprenda CEO does well to point out that the current state of enterprise IT is not nearly as monolithically archaic as portrayed by Maritz in his webcast launch of Pivotal last week.