Hot Take: VMware Buys Pivotal? Is it all about Kubernetes?
Transcript
hey it's Keith Tyler from the CTL visor comm hot take on VMware acquiring pivotal or announcing that they'll acquire pivotal okay a little history first pivotal is kind of the unone stepchild of VMware back when Pat gal singer became the CEO of VMware he doubled down on virtualization I was super critical of this move because obviously we're in a period where past platform-as-a-service is the future of enterprise IT in the assets that became pivotal were pretty much the crown jewels of VMware escape ability when it
came to pass VMware was not able to penetrate that market after attempting for a couple of years so they spun out pivotal focused on virtualization and we have the amazing market cap that's VMware today so from a quarter to quarter short-term investment perspective pretty good move by Pat now we obviously in a field where kubernetes and containers and platform as a service is taking off in the enterprise pivotal hasn't been able to capture lightning in a bottle and explode to the level of success that you
would expect from a all container all past based platform they are in financial trouble they've stopped growing they haven't been able to have the conversations that VMware we're trying to have them have when they were inside of VMware you can make whatever judgment you want on Michael Dell and Dell technologies moving some of the shells around and VMware acquiring pivotal but this is another shot for VMware to expand the conversation one of the things that I think VMware self team consistently runs into is when they
bring their application platform products to the IT infrastructure team it's kind of a big shrug they aren't really interested in application platforms and then when we go to talk to that team then where it doesn't really have the reputation to get the attention of the app teams so by a cloud acquiring pivotal in their Cloud Foundry platform VMware gets instant chops from a field perspective does that equate to VMware now being able to have those expanded conversations well they may get the meeting but will they
be able to capitalize on these meetings and still not only the entire vmware vsphere and V spirit management in AWS relationship alongside the pivotal Cloud Foundry story and the kubernetes story that they have in PKS it's a really tough tough transition to make not a knock on VMware or their field sales is just two very different conversations to have two very different audiences and a hard hard transition to make for a company the size of VMware I'd love to hear feedback do you think this is
a good move for VMware and pivotal in general or should VMware look elsewhere for this capability and Dale just take an L on the pivotal experiment hit me up on the way up the CTO visor comm is the website and of course you can follow me on twitter at CTO advisor more importantly subscribe to the newsletter talk to you next CTO dos
