TheCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante caught up with Leo Spiegel, SVP of Starategy & Corporate Development at Pivotal, and had a long chat about the inception of the company and the partnership with GE at the GE Industrial Internet event in San Francisco.

Spiegel was encouraged by Furrier to talk a bit about Pivotal, as it’s a fairly new company, and he obliged. Leo Spiegel explained how Pivotal was a combination of assets that came from EMC and VMware. The products and services which are now part of Pivotal include Greenplum, Cloud Foundry, Cetas, Pivotal Labs and other products from the VMware vFabricTM Suite. Launched on April 1st, 2013, Pivotal announced its plans for Pivotal One, a next-generation Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which integrates new data workflows, modern programming frameworks, cloud portability and support for legacy systems.

Asked about his vision on the industrial internet trend, Spiegel said that for him it all started with the sensors. In any industry there are various devices such as jet engines and turbines, but by adding sensors on top of them the collection of data is enabled. The sensors start sending data and optimization is enabled. The real challenge was not the generation of data, but building a platform that could keep up with the velocity of data and making real-time decision that can enable businesses to do things – like shutting down a power plant if there’s a problem.

The importance of data is obvious

Pivotal’s mission is enabling customers to build a new class of applications, leveraging big and fast data with the power of cloud independence.

Back in the day everyone focused on the application logic, says Spiegel. Nowadays, the importance of data became obvious. And, as the world is changing, the amount of data people are generating is overwhelming. Pivotal saw in this a big, big opportunity, and the beginning of a long revolution. The company is uniquely positioned to help customers better understand their data, allowing them to act in real-time. It’s a new wave of value creation, as Vellante added.

Pivotal One makes it possible, for the first time, for the employees of the enterprise to rapidly create consumer-grade applications. As part of the strategic partnership with GE, Pivotal’s next generation enterprise Platform-as-a-Service will accelerate GE’s ability to develop new Analytic services & solutions for the industrial internet.