By Cat Yong
EMC Corporation may have shed some last remnants of their image as a storage company, when they announced Pivotal One, last April. Dubbed a next-generation Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, Pivotal One even caught the imagination of multinational conglomerate, GE, which invested around US$105 million in the startup company, Pivotal, in pursuit of their vision of the Industrial Internet. The ICT industry in general, already knows this as the “Internet of Things.”
During an EMC Malaysia business update briefing, CEO Cheam Tat Inn had explained, “In the late 90s, data was secondary when it came to planning. Today, there is all this unstructured data, that the industry begins to wonder finally, ‘What can we do with it? How can we monetise it?’ Data is in the forefront of the industry now.”
From 2005 to 2020, data will grow by a factor of 300, from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes. By 2020, 40% of information in the digital universe is also forecasted to have cloud service provider ‘involvement.’
These days, apps needs to be able to handle unstructured data, or big data, that is also extremely fast when one factors in how Internet company Google indexes the World Wide Web. That had required them turning to new architectures, which is what Pivotal One is trying to enable as well.
That said, EMC recognises that legacy footprints and architectures will not be going away anytime soon, and have identified that work deployments on cloud by 2016 would be running still on existing architecture worth a sizeable US$32 billion. There would be less total investment in new architecture, but it would potentially have 6 times the CAGR of existing architectures.
Cheam had also shared that EMC views virtual private cloud deployments, as a major growth area. In fact, the Big Question of whether cloud computing is taking off in Malaysia, could be answered by his observation that cloud service providers that aren’t necessarily traditional telcos are starting to emerge in Malaysia, to serve specific markets like China, Japan and the Middle East.
He shared that Pivotal would launch in this region with an official event in Singapore later this year. In the meantime, EMC would be running initiatives together with MDeC to boost local data scientist capabilities.
Chuck’s Blog here, gives a pretty comprehensive explanation that can help get you started on wrapping your head around Pivotal the company, and its next generation offering, Pivotal One,
