Bill Cook | EMC World 2013
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 08/05/2013

Bill Cook, Pivotal, at EMC World 2013 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante

Bill Cook -- COO, Pivotal stopped by theCUBE on day three of EMC World to talk data leveraging with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. He shared some comments about the transition from Greenplum and how excited he is about Pivotal One — a next-gen enterprise Platform-as-a-Service that Pivotal expects to launch Q4. Pivotal and Cook's team aim to make the evolution of data management as seamless and painless as possible.

Cook really believes that EMC has a vision of how all of its products and companies integrate together. He mentions that the next-gen of apps share a common data fabric. Pivotal has committed to a Hadoop HTFS-based stack, the goal being to leverage off of a common file system. With the backing first of EMC, then VMware, and now GE with it's recent $105 million investment — Pivotal is poised to make the vision EMC has a reality.

Part of that vision is a common data tier. By leveraging storage capabilities, it's a win-win for everyone. Important too, is the commitment to be very open and open-sourced-based in EMC's solutions. Cook agreed with Furrier that OpenStack has resonated well with the developer community, and he says that he has a goal of staying up a layer. EMC wants to give the application developers independence and count on having choice and options. In doing so, it becomes a non-architectural discussion and developers can leverage new data fabrics.

In the 1980′s and 1990′s the standard was multi-vendor. In 2013 the new multi-vendor is frameworks, according to Cook. "I think open source is the new multi-vendor framework." Cook said that people don't want to be locked-in to a particular vendor or host. The greater mission of EMC is to contribute back to open source and OpenStack while having value add (reads: IP) on top of that. Data tier, paths tier, application tier; they will sell one complete solution but you can purchase only one individually from the rest.

Pivotal is a software company at its core. A long-term goal Cook alludes to is leveraging the broader ecosystem. Not surprisingly, more market adoption too. IPO is a definite goal for Pivotal, and a great way for it to continue to attract the best talent (upside from an equity angle). EquityANGLE -- new 'Angle' on SiliconANGLE? *just a thought* In order to make GE's investment and Pivotal's very aggressive vision a reality Cook highlighted three areas of focus:

Layout the specific points of intersection and use cases for GE divisions
Alignment of the architecture between the two companies
First use cases of GE divisions shared with the market
Cook believes we are absolutely in the next big wave of Big Data applications with Pivotal's partnership with GE. "No question -- makes intuitive sense," he said. Healthcare, telecommunications (telco), retail, government ... what industry isn't primed for innovation and better usage and understanding of Big Data? How people think about data, put it to work, context of the moment — all sit ripe for innovation and execution.

As far as his top key metrics for the rest of 2013:

product side: Pivotal One coming to a reality (integrated stack does exist)
customer adoption/partner adoption of use cases
I'll leave you with Cook's parting words: "This is a momentum story. Show the industry what's possible. I bet on Pivotal, and here is my story."