VMware Spins Out Pivotal Initiative

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EMC spun out its VMware subsidiary as a standalone company back in 2007. Now VMware is set to create its own spin out, in the form of the Pivotal Initiative.

The Pivotal Initiative will take assets that both VMware and EMC have determined to be non core to VMware and EMC’s businesses, in an effort to accelerate them. Those assets include VMware’s vFabric, Cloud Foundry and Cetas organizations. In total, some 1,400 employees from both EMC and VMware will land in the Pivotal Initiative when the group is officially live in the second quarter of 2013.

The Pivotal Initiative will be led by Paul Maritz, currently the Chief Strategy Officer of EMC. Maritz had been the CEO of VMware until earlier this year, when he was replaced by current CEO Pat Gelsinger.

“The Pivotal Initiative will enable a new generation of workloads that can exploit the advancements VMware in driving in the datacenter,” Terry Anderson, VP of Global Communications at VMware wrote. “By realigning resources within the Pivotal Initiative, VMware can more fully focus resources on delivering the software defined datacenter, the de facto infrastructure at the heart of cloud computing, and on end-user computing – two areas where we see tremendous opportunity for growth.”

The core components heading into the Pivotal Initiative are all about software enablement for virtualized deployments. VMware’s vFabric includes the SpringSource and GemFire technology groups. VMware first announced vFabric in 2010 as an application fabric for the cloud computing.

The vFabric platform was expanded this year with the release of the vFabric 5.1 update. In the new update, VMware included the PostgreSQL database as well as the SQLfire in-memory database. SQLfire is based on Gemfire technology that VMware acquired with the acquisition of GemStone in 2010.

The Cloud Foundry piece is VMware’s open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering and was launched in April of 2011. VMware CTO, Steve Herrod has publicly been very bullish on Cloud Foundry. Earlier this year he called Cloud Foundry, ‘The Linux of the cloud.”

At least one analyst group is taking a favorable view of the Pivotal Initiative. “EMC, in our view, is one of the best in large-cap technology at maximizing value from its acquisitions and we expect this re-organization to help better leverage existing assets/initiatives within the two companies,” ISI Group analyst, Brian Marshall stated.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.