Pivotal, VMware collaborate on new Photon Platform for containers

SAN FRANCISCO--- Pivotal is contributing to one of the cornerstone debuts at VMware's annual expo this week.

The software company unveiled its own new turnkey solution designed for VMware's new Photon Platform, an API-centric platform designed for containers and and high-churn workloads that was also introduced to the world on Monday.

James Watters, vice president and general manager of the cloud platform group at Pivotal, characterized VMware's Photon Platform as "the perfect substrate for Pivotal Cloud Foundry," Pivotal's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) entry promising an out-of-the-box cloud computing environment.

The Pivotal-VMware collaboration is being pitched toward customers just joining the cloud party now -- specifically those deciding between building their own clouds or deploying an entirely cloud native software stack.

Thus, through the Pivotal turnkey toolset, IT professionals are being promised with new developer environments that can be deployed at scale on a subscription-based pricing model.

The VMware Photon Platform and Pivotal Cloud Foundry turnkey solution is slated to roll out during the first half of 2016.

Founded in 2012 as EMC and VMware merged some of their big data and cloud assets together, Pivotal offers data, cloud and pair programming services to startups and enterprise companies alike.

Pivotal has been quite active over the last few months in rolling new products and establishing more industry alliances.

In February, the company launched the Open Data Platform Hadoop initiative to speed adoption of the open source framework. Among some of the other founding partners included General Electric, Hortonworks and IBM along with parent companies VMware and EMC.

By April, Pivotal, along with IBM and Hortonworks, announced their respective Hadoop platforms standardized on the Open Data Platform were ready to ship.

Pivotal also introduced a new method in March for installing its application development platform on Amazon Web Services with the goal of boosting deployment of Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based business has also been shaking up its leadership structure this summer, most recently with the promotion of co-founder Rob Mee to chief executive officer, replacing Paul Maritz.

Maritz, also formerly CEO of VMware, isn't going far though as he has been appointed executive chairman for Pivotal's board of directors.