Pivotal's head of products: We're moving to a multi-cloud world

The enterprise IT world is moving toward an open, multi-cloud model, but a clear definition of just what multi-cloud means is still a question mark.

Speaking at Gigaom Structure 2014 in San Francisco on Thursday, Pivotal president and head of products Scott Yara acknowledged that the big tech industry at-large is still trying to converge on what this definition might be.

Yara suggested that the future of multi-cloud starts with looking closer at cloud-based computers around the world and unlock the power presented by new, modern hardware.

Platform-as-a-Service, he continued, serves as the foundation for a common abstraction for cloud-based computers.

When Pivotal meets with customers big and small, Yara said a lot of them want to take advantage of cloud-based computing but still aren't sure how to do it.

"A lot of these cloud-based data services are going to need to be built close to where the data is generated," Yara predicted, positing how the multi-cloud approach simply provides businesses with more options.

The end result is to enable enterprises to build up to the data or build down to it, depending on what the user case and requirements might be.

It is here were Pivotal comes in, he suggested, framing it as a "unique company" being that it was spun out from VMware and its parent company EMC more than a year ago.

The San Francisco-based software firm launched with a big data suite combining the powers of the Greenplum analytic database system, Hadoop-based data platforms, and GemFire, a scale-out data transaction database with real-time processing.

"The interesting thing about Pivotal is just how new it is," Yara remarked. "We're still very early in the journey of building this company."

Nevertheless, Yara reiterated Pivotal's commitment to the open source community, touting the achievements by other industry players. He also described how we're seeing everyone from Amazon to Google to Rackspace, among others, innovate in order to unlock "big pools of computing," such as memory and storage.

Pointing toward an industry competitor but also a partner on General Electric's Industrial Internet cloud, Yara praised Amazon especially for doing a great job in elevating the cloud-based computing market, noting that the "breadth of AWS capabilities is broad. "

At the same time, Yara stressed that the open source Platform-as-a-Service Cloud Foundry is getting us to the open cloud world "that we all want."