EMC Pivotal has a major challenge trying to wrest a significant share of the online development market from industry leader AWS, writes Wikibon CTO David Floyer in his latest Professional Alert, “Can EMC Pivotal Compete with AWS?” The core of this market is development of the new mobile-cloud applications that are providing organizations with new ways to do business, new markets and opportunities to restructure and reassign whole divisions of their IT departments. This new application structure, which is replacing client/server as the leading architecture for new applications, needs to be developed in the cloud, and AWS has become the choice for most of those development products.

EMC firmly believes that mobile-cloud is the new application architecture. To gain a foothold in this market, it today announced Pivotal One as a Platform–as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud platform. It includes:

•  Pivotal CF, a distribution of the Cloud Foundry PaaS,
• Pivotal HD, a distribution of Apache Hadoop,
• Pivotal AX, providing automatic analytic instrumentation,
• Rabbit MQ, and open source messaging system,
• tcServer, an extension of the Tomcat server, and,
• MySQL service.

This is a direct competitor in the PaaS application development market, dominated by AWS.

Amazon has its disadvantages. It uses proprietary APIs, which makes it hard to migrate the finished application to an internal cloud, or for that matter to one of the other PaaS contenders from a variety of companies including Google, IBM, Microsoft Azure and SAP. Also its pricing structure makes it impossible for companies to anticipate what their bill will be, something about which Wikibon members universally complain and which, Floyer says, needs to be fixed.

An open but immature platform

In contrast, Pivotal is open. The core Pivotal Cloud Foundry and the various other Pivotal One components each has a following among developers. However, the platform as a whole is immature and lacks the tight integration of AWS. Integrating the various pieces from different sources, including other EMC acquisitions, into a cohesive whole will require proprietary APIs and other code that will create problems for users who want to move the finished applications built on Pivotal One in-house.

And while each of these has its own following among developers, they are not necessarily the same developers. So, writes Floyer, the whole may be less than its parts in value unless its users adopt all of these pieces. This will negatively impact Pivotal’s bottom-up “land and expand” growth strategy among developers inside organizations. A top down “corporate mandate” strategy, the alternative, has proven to be a non-starter when attempted in the past. A company may designate Pivotal (or IBM SmartCloud, etc.) as the “corporate standard” development platform, but developers given a project and (typically tight) deadline for completion will ignore that mandate in favor of the platform that is easiest for them to use. Today that platform most often is AWS.

Pivotal also faces distractions from its minority owners. While EMC owns 69 percent of EMC Pivotal, GE owns 10 percent, and VMware, the remainder. GE’s interest is in the Internet-of-things and specifically support for sensors it builds into its various products, starting with jet engines, and will try to refocus EMC Pivotal on that area. This, after all, is what it bought with its $100 million dollar investment. VMware wants Pivotal to use its industry-leading hypervisor as the virtualization and abstraction layers, which could keep developers in non-VMware shops away.

Pivotal One: Addition or distraction?

Pivotal overall gets most of its revenue from the Gemfire data-in-memory database and Greenplum scale-out platform for Hadoop Big Data. Floyer writes that while Pivotal’s plan calls for each of these to contribute roughly 50 percent of revenue, actually Greenplum provides much more than 50 percent. In terms of market share each is a small player in its respective, crowded market.

Therefore, a key question for Pivotal’s leadership is how important the Pivotal platform is to the success of these two products and vice versa. If it cannot contribute to their growth, being part of the Pivotal group “will be a distraction to two startups that need to focus on their core value to their customers.”

To compete, Floyer says, EMC Pivotal should shed any technologies that do not directly support its role as a PaaS for development and eventually production implementation of mobile-cloud applications. Comarketing different brands only works when the products are complementary and target buyers are the same, neither of which will be true in the vast majority of sales for Pivotal, Gemfire and Greenplum. Thus trying to push the in-house Gemfire and Greenplum brands will only further disadvantage for Pivotal One versus AWS, while trying to comarket with Pivotal will not provide any benefit for either of the other two products.

Application developer support

The key to Pivotal’s success is the support of application developers. To compete effectively against dominant market player AWS, Floyer writes, EMC Pivotal should “jettison everything that does not directly contribute in helping its core platform foundation attract developers and focus on mobile-cloud.”  Even with that, and even when it has matured its platform, it will have a hard time matching the AWS ease-of-use and the volume of new features and other add-ons that it seems to announce weekly. Trying to co-market with Greenplum and Gemfire will only further weaken its market position. Those products, Floyer suggests, should be moved to a separate part of the company.

As with all Wikibon research, this complete, detailed analysis is available in its entirety without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to post comments, questions, and their own Professional Alerts and white papers on the site.