April | 2014 | ctoblog

Platform (Photo credit: Geir Halvorsen)

In one of the recent interview the CEO from Pivotal, Paul Maritz, stated that he wants to disrupt the disrupter. The AWS platform offering is addressing a majority of the public cloud demands today and Pivotal wants to play here strong too.

So what is the disruption AWS is addressing?
“Fast”, DataCenter by credit card, to name one. “Easy” maybe another. “Cheap” is also stated. All this has nothing to do with a conventional DC, more the opposite, slow, complex and expensive is more what CIO´s today see in their environments. This is the disruption, there is only one missing piece, “Trust” or “Risk”. Is this not what DC are build for?
Let´s circle back in time, where the Mainframe was born, lets call that a platform one. The majority of applications written there have been determined the production systems. Of course there have been litte users and litte amount of demands, but the origin was done thru the developers.
History has shown that there was only one player left after 30 years. The programs still running and working, but hard to maintain and not able to be inline with current standards of customer experience.
With the age of the PC and more with appearance of Linux and x86 architecture the second platform was born, we called that client-server architecture. Also here the developers led the way with creativity and innovation. Many languages where born, ended up in the internet itself. The HW was still very expensive and followed moores law for years. Microsoft got the dominant player. This generated the complexity in the DC, since the legacy has to work with the new stuff. Silos where build and middleware controlled the systems.
“Suddenly” Google and Facebook like companies where borne and storage, CPU and Network more or less have been given for free. They connected billions of users with millions of applications. The App century where born, lets call it third platform. And again the developers paved the way. From my perspective most of the current App`s are specialized browsers which have a nice interface to Informations.
Here we go thats the buzzword we will see more and more in the future. Information, which is data with meaning, was always generated in in companies and kept very close. Now OpenData appeared, mobile devices generate more data and Information suddenly could be enriched to get new business models in place.
Have, in platform 1 and 2, business leaders invest in DataCenters, not knowing how large the business will go, now they can purchase non the trip and on demand via a credit card, nice.
Many apps and services consumers today buy will leverage such infrastructure.
Hence, guess what, what moste of the the startups leverage this model.

Pivotal Labs (Photo credit: teamstickergiant)

Now how to disrupt this growing business?
The answer is in the definition what business. Large global companies will have big troubles to run their business under the current offerings. Even the current cloud provider adopt fast and be very creative, there will be a lot of legacy which cannot transported. Like the mainframes not to the client-server architectures. The key is in combination, or bridging. Investments which have been taken and will be taken to support the current business models have to be adjusted for the next generation architecture. EMC`s federation approach is aiming for that. Complexity of Infrastructure will be solved by Converging and Software Defined – X concepts, Optimization and orchestration of the infrastructure vmware is leading the industry by a magnitude and pivotal will provide the open platform architecture to combine the business needs form the current and future demands.
When we talk technology, Cloud Foundry and major parts of Pivotal One, which comprises many supreme technologies are open and crowed developed to exponential capture the great ideas from this planet. This is the real disruption. In Platform one it was very country centric, Platform two was dominated by the thinking of the western world, the next platform has to address a global demand and population.