LAS VEGAS – EMC Corp. sees huge potential for channel partners to offer high-end solutions to enterprise organizations with its new cloud-enabled application platform, Pivotal One, which the datacentre infrastructure vendor touts as a potential $1 billion business in the next five years.
“We have taken our capabilities and stitched them together into a new platform and we are calling it Pivotal One,” EMC president Frank Tucci said Tuesday during the general session at EMC World 2013. “And it is available to you today.”
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Pivotal One is the spinoff of EMC’s 2012 acquisition of San Francisco-based agile software company Pivotal Labs. Electronic and aeronautics firm GE and virtualization company VMware also have stakes in Pivotal. Pivotal now draws technology draws from its own development efforts, as well as EMC and VMware’s products and services such as EMC’s Greenplum and Pivotal HD, an Apache Hadoop distribution, and VMware’s Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and Gemstone.
Tucci said Pivotal One will be “strongly anchored in open source” to allow providers and their customers the freedom of choice to determine what hardware and applications they want to run with the platform.
He said Pivotal One will be:
- Multi cloud
- Developer-friendly
- Enterprise-friendly
“Pivotal One will work well with the channel,” according to Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal. “A lot of our products like Greenplum’s components can be folded into Pivotal and allow providers to create high-end cloud offerings that can work with the existing ecosystems of their customers. For now, these services will not be for the SMB (small and medium sized business) space, but the enterprise space. Further down the road, we can see the channel selling to the SMB,” he said.
Positioning Pivotal One as a platform-as-a-service play, Maritz said the new platform can serve as “the basis for developing business intelligence-as-a-service so that providers can sell analytics as part of their solution offerings.”
“We’re hopeful the new platform will be a $1 billion business within the next five years,” he added.
“We will start offering it as software for the enterprise,” Maritz said when asked what business model EMC planned for Pivotal One. “In time that will change; hopefully service providers can license it and offer the software as a service.”
However, at least one analyst agrees with Maritz’s assessment.
“I think it will be as Paul Maritz said, an offering for the enterprise,” said Paul Edwards, director of infrastructure channels research at analyst firm IDC. “Perhaps service providers can use it as their own platform. Channel partners will not pick it up until it becomes a technology to build