Microsoft and VMware cozy up, forgoing past rivalry

The companies have worked together on a new device management initiative

Microsoft's new, more collaborative approach to the computing industry was on display at VMware's annual conference in San Francisco Tuesday, when executives from both companies shared the stage to talk about new device management features in Windows 10.

As VMware Executive Vice President Sanjay Poonen explained, VMware and Microsoft, historically fierce rivals, have been working together more closely under the leadership of Satya Nadella. That work has now borne fruit in the form of Project A2, a new service that brings together VMware's AirWatch device management service and its App Volumes application delivery technology. Using Project A2, Windows 10 users can log in to their corporate account, get their device set up for use with a company's resources and then get all the applications they need provided straight from IT.

Project A2 is made possible by new tools in Windows 10 that make it easier for IT professionals to provision devices and ensure that they comply with company policy. Microsoft makes use of that with its own device management services, but has also made them available to companies like VMware.

The appearance of Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jim Alkove at VMworld is a significant move that Poonen didn't let go unnoticed. He told the crowd that people backstage at the conference had compared the appearance to Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan working together.

"I think you're the tall Reagan, and I'm the Indian version of Gorbachev," Poonen joked.

Microsoft is singing a very different tune from the position it took last year. During VMworld 2014, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson took to his blog to discuss everything he thought VMware got wrong with AirWatch and why people should use Microsoft's management tools. (He hasn't yet published anything relating to VMworld this year.)

The charm offensive from Alkove is part of Microsoft's push to get businesses to adopt Windows 10. The company said last week that 1.5 million devices are already running the enterprise edition of its new operating system, and the company said that it plans to have 1 billion devices running Windows 10 within 3 years. Getting businesses to bring their deployments into the next generation is key for the company's ambitions.

It's also another sign of how the Redmond-based tech giant, under Nadella, is playing nicer with companies that it would have treated more harshly in the past. Microsoft has also doubled down on building out its services for non-Windows platforms, and is working better with companies like Salesforce.com that compete with it.

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Pivotal launched from VMware, EMC technologies

General Electric has invested $105 million in the new company

Making good on a promise made in December, VMware and parent company EMC have launched a new company, called Pivotal, to offer an enterprise-ready data analysis platform as a service (PaaS) based on software from both companies.

Pivotal's new services and newly retailored software packages will allow enterprises the ability to replicate the IT operations used by today's "Internet Giants" such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon Web Services, said Paul Maritz, who is the Pivotal CEO and was the CEO of VMware from 2008 until 2012. Maritz spoke in a webcast Wednesday launching the new company.

The new company, Pivotal, also got $105 million investment from General Electric, which plans to use Pivotal's technologies as part of its own set of analysis services to industry.
Maritz and Ruh
Stephen Lawson

Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, left, and General Electric Vice President and Corporate Officer Bill Ruh spoke on Wednesday at Pivotal's launch event in San Francisco.

Today, the large Internet services handle and analyze data far more efficiently than most enterprises do, Maritz said. "If you look at the way they do IT, it is significantly different than the way enterprises do IT," he said. Specifically, they are good at storing large amounts of data and drawing information from it in a cost-effective manner. They can develop applications very quickly. And they are good at automating routines, Maritz said. "They used these three capabilities together to introduce new experiences and business processes that have yielded -- depended on how you want to count it -- a trillion dollars in market value," Maritz said.

To replicate the way these Internet services use IT, today's enterprises will require "a set of new applications that can be easily run on existing substrates," Maritz said. Pivotal will offer a unified platform of a PaaS service and on-premises technologies to make this possible, he said.

The PaaS will run on top of the customer's choice of an infrastructure as a service (IaaS), such as Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft's Azure IaaS service. "We like to think of the current generation of infrastructure-as-a-service as the new hardware," Maritz said.

Taxonomically speaking, Pivotal One will be broken into three sets of technologies. The cloud fabric will be based on the Cloud Foundry PaaS software, which can pull in IaaS services from providers such as Amazon and OpenStack. The data fabric set of offerings will include tools for analyzing data, such as Pivotal's distribution of Hadoop, the Hadoop File System (HDFS), and real-time database services. The application fabric will provide tools for enterprises to quickly build and deploy their own cloud applications.

Pivotal is using a number of technologies developed or acquired by EMC and VMware. From EMC, Pivotal is using the Greenplum data analysis software. From VMware, it will use the Spring Java framework, the GemFire messaging platform, the Cloud Foundry PaaS software, and the Cetas business intelligence software. It will also be using various supporting technologies from the VMware vFabric packages of software to run cloud operations.

In addition to the PaaS, Pivotal also will continue to offer these technologies as stand-alone software packages, for use on premises. Many are rebranded under the Pivotal name. GemFire will be known as Pivotal GemFire, RabbitMQ will become Pivotal RabbitMQ, and so on. The company launched a Hadoop distribution, called Pivotal HD, in February.

Pivotal will use the GE investment to fund additional research. GE also will use Pivotal's data analysis service for its own customers. GE has been ramping up a set of services around what it calls the industrial Internet, where transportation, energy, health care and other industries would benefit from advanced analysis of machine intelligence-generated data.

Incorporated on April 1, Pivotal will have over 1,250 employees, including more than 700 engineers. It will be owned by VMware and EMC, and, with its investment, GE has taken an ownership stake in the company as well. The service is expected to be generally available by the end of 2013.

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