pivotal-logo-geWhen Pivotal was spun out of VMware and EMC, many people were excited about a well-funded entity, chock full of some of the coolest modern tech, and without the hang-ups of having to think about existing products or revenue streams. The theory went that Pivotal was being positioned to be able to create the core systems that organizations would need in a cloud and big data fuelled world. Slowly that vision is being realized, today sees the next step of that with the announcement of a suite that sees Pivotal bundle up Hadoop, the MPP relational and in-memory transactional database, all with a single subscription price.

So first some detail. Pivotal is announcing the Pivotal Big Data Suite, an annual subscription based software, support, and maintenance package that bundles Pivotal Greenplum Database, Pivotal GemFire, Pivotal SQLFire, Pivotal GemFire XD, Pivotal HAWQ, and Pivotal HD into a pool of products for customers. The suite supports Apache Hadoop and HDFS and, as long as a cumulative contract minimum is met, customers will be able to use both these big data products and Pivotal HD.

Pivotal uses the term “Business Data lake” to describe the move to merge both traditional approaches towards data infrastructure, and more contemporary approaches. Customers therefore have the ability to chop and change their usage across the component modules with no pricing impact. The platform is prices per core and hence only computation is charged, pure storage isn’t taxed. What this means for organizations is that they can consolidate all their different sources of data into one “lake” and analyze it as and when they like.

Customers don’t need to chose to go “all in” on one type of analysis infrastructure, rather they can look at efficiency and time and decide on the component part of the platform that best meets their needs. Said Michael Cucchi, senior director at Pivotal:

We see this release and new solution impacting multiple markets.  It certainly significantly impacts the pure play hadoop vendor market, with the inclusion of unlimited Pivotal HD, this product impacts the vendor’s who’s business is based on incremental licensing revenue from data growth and hadoop cluster growth.  We’re effectively taking the runaway license costs associated with storing big data off the table.

Indeed….

Pivotal is making a big bet on they key drivers and requirements that the enterprise of the future will have – they’re delivering a compelling solution that puts solutions, rather than specific technologies, first. Of course there are a wealth of vendors talking a similar language – witness Cloudera who just last week raised a huge $900M including the largest ever investment Intel has made in a company. Or HortonWorks who recently raised another $100m. And then there are the vendors offering in-memory analysis on top of enterprise data – SAP‘s HANA being a good example. Pivotal is hoping the combination of flexibility and breadth will give them a winning edge – it’s sure going to be an interesting journey. Source