Pivotal and VMware Announce New Collaborations, Integrations, and Services at VMworld 2014

August 28, 2014 Paul M. Davis

featured-vmworld-starsVMware kicked off VMworld, its annual week-long showcase in San Francisco, on Sunday with a number of significant product and partnership announcements. Aligned with Pivotal’s goal to empower enterprises to develop and deliver modern applications on an open cloud platform, VMware is pushing for a new model of IT that supports hybrid cloud platforms and drives agile, and mobile-first companies.

The major announcements made during VMworld converge with Pivotal’s vision for its enterprise Cloud Foundry distribution, Pivotal CF, in significant ways. As with Pivotal CF, VMware’s virtualization products and services are prioritzing open standards and collaboration within the industry, mobile-first application development, and providing enterprises with choice, flexibility, and easy IT management.

During Pat Gelsinger’s keynote, the VMware CEO announced a partnership between Pivotal, VMware, Docker, and Google to integrate container technology into VMware’s virtualization offerings. The initiative will enable containers to isolate distributed applications on virtual machines, offering enterprises “containers without compromise,” in Gelsinger’s words. Pivotal will work with Docker and VMware to enhance the libcontainer project to include capabilities from Warden, a VMware-authored Linux container technology developed for Cloud Foundry. The Pivotal CF team has been working with containers since 2011, VMware noted in a statement, with this commitment being the natural evolution of those efforts.

The announcement received plenty of attention from the press, with outlets praising VMware for embracing the flexibility that forward-thinking enterprises require to develop and deliver innovative applications at scale. At Forbes, Ben Kepes wrote “With these announcements the company has found a logical way to both support containerization but within the context of existing virtualized and vSphere environments.” Jonathan Vanian wrote at GigaOm that containers remain a nascent technology within the enterprise. Hes states that VMware’s embrace of Docker and its commitment to collaborating with other large industry players “show that it is taking containers to the mainstream. Each one of these three container-focussed companies gives VMware a big boost to one day having containers and virtual machines coexist in harmony in all areas of virtualization.”

As detailed during the presentations and sessions at VMworld, Pivotal CF and VMware’s products are built to work together to provide enterprises with the flexibility and choice, freeing them from the constraints of vendor lock-in and proprietary software. In conjunction with VMware’s virtualization products and services, Pivotal CF enables enterprises to deliver workloads where they see fit, choose who operates workloads and where, and distribute apps across multiple clouds based on availability and needs.

Pivotal CF is optimized to allow VMware environments to deploy on-premise using the company’s vSphere or vCloud Director products, or in the cloud with vCloud Air, VMware’s hybrid cloud service. During presentations at VMworld, Pivotal expanded on its recent announcement of new mobile services for Pivotal CF, which enable enterprises using vCloud Air to deploy workflows on-premise, or in the cloud. Customers can run mobile apps on vCloud Air at scale, while leveraging insights gained from analytics that run in their own data warehouses.

Ease of management is also a priority for VMware and Pivotal CF. Whether enterprises are serving applications on-premises using Pivotal CF, or in the cloud through vCloud Air, the open API’s and automation of Pivotal CF offers simplifies the IT management, enabling enterprises to manage legacy systems while evolving to meet the demands of continuous, reliable, and rapid application development.

Pivotal had a large presence at VMworld, with a number of presentations and demos at the Pivotal booth, demonstrating how Pivotal CF works with vSphere and vCloud Air, and the development advantages provided by Pivotal CF’s new mobile services. Over 2300 attendees watched Pivotal’s theater presentation on Sunday night, and the Pivotal booth hosted hundreds of demos on Pivotal CF and VMware in the South Hall of Moscone Center. In addition, over 200 enterprise customers and prospects attended an executive reception on Tuesday night at Pivotal’s San Francisco offices, where they enjoyed food, drinks, and a tour of Pivotal Labs, and also watched short presentations by Pivotal’s CEO Paul Maritz and Scott Aronson, SVP of Global Field Operations.

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