EMC and VMware spin-off Pivotal outlines PaaS plans

EMC and VMware spin-off Pivotal has officially begun trading as a standalone entity and fleshed out details about its new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

Pivotal was initially formed through a collaboration between tech giants VMware and EMC, but has now established itself as an independent company.

VMware and EMC are still listed as investors in the firm, along with power company General Electric (GE).

The company boasts around 1,250 staff and is headed up by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

The firm took the wraps off its Pivotal One PaaS platform yesterday, which will allow developers to create cloud-independent applications using big data tools, new programming frameworks and cloud architectures.

In a statement, Maritz said Pivotal's aim is to tap into customer demands for new products that will provide real-time insights into their data.

"There is a widespread need emerging for new solutions that allow customers to drive new business value by cost-effectively reasoning over large datasets, ingesting information that is rapidly arriving from multiple sources, writing applications that allow real-time reactions, and doing all of this in a cloud-independent or portable manner," he said.

"The need for these solutions can be found across a wide range of industries and it is our belief that these solutions will drive the need for new platforms. Pivotal aims to be a leading provider of such a platform."

In a research note, market watcher Gartner said the type of applications Pivotal is targeting include those offered by the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com.

"Pivotal's declared mission is to democractise these innovations and make them available to enterprise IT architects and innovative ISVs," wrote Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

However, Natis claimed the company was missing a couple of "notable components" that are essential for the creation of a "comprehensive" cloud computing platform.

"There is no integration technology...integration of data, applications, cloud and web services, partners and event streams is an essential element of such an environment," said Natis.

"Considerable functionality will have to be developed, acquired and integrated into the platform before it can claim victory," he added.