SpringOne Platform, Pivotal’s user conference, is happening in Austin this week. Today, the conference officially opened with a keynote featuring James Watters, Senior VP of Strategy at Pivotal. After some initial remarks, he brought Pivotal’s soon-to-be new owner and current CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger, on stage.
The acquisition was announced two months ago during the VMware World conference. Here are three key takeaways from James and Pat’s chat:
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VMware Tanzu
- One of the big announcements in the wake of the acquisition has been VMware Tanzu. This end-to-end platform brings together VMware and Pivotal technologies to build, run, and manage applications anywhere. Pat said this is “how to take Kubernetes to every enterprise.” Pivotal and Spring are key ways for enterprises to build applications alongside another recent VMware acquisition, Bitnami. VMware PKS and Project Pacific sit in the “run” layer, and Heptio offers a single management plane to manage all of an organization’s Kubernetes clusters.
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VMware + Open Source
- When asked about VMware’s position in the open source community, Pat said, “We’re working on it.” That has been an important conversation in their recent acquisitions of Heptio and Pivotal as well. The open source world is changing. Pivotal and the Spring community are largely invested in contributing, and part of that investment is VMware also enhancing its focus on those initiatives and its commitment to being a leader in open source. “VMware is highly committed to changing our open source credibility,” Pat concluded.
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VMware + Pivotal
- At one point, James turned to Pat and asked “Why Pivotal?” When Dell, EMC, and VMware decided to separate back in 2012, separation allowed Pivotal to grow as a company. So, after seven years, why now? Now, Pat said, is the time to bring these arms back together “because now it’s time to scale.” He feels like Pivotal is perfectly positioned to scale because of the widespread adoption of Kubernetes in the market. The two organizations were already working closely and had built a bridge that makes the acquisition a natural transition. “We’re coming full circle,” said Pat.
If you’re at SpringOne, stop by our booth (#G14 – the bright red one!) to connect with our Pivotal experts. We have SMEs on site across app transformation, containers, DevOps, and more, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the conference. You can also take our 5-question survey on the state of app modernization to enter to win a $250 Southwest gift card!
