Al Sargent, Director of Product Marketing at Pivotal, discussed the company’s Pivotal One product, development trends, and his take on the recently concluded Velocity conference, with theCUBE host John Furrier, live in Santa Clara.

Pivotal’s objective is to “enable the consumer Internet.” Their goal is to take the technology and trends in the consumer segment and “rive them into the enterprise,” so that they can have their own Google/Yahoo-grade type of infrastructure. Pivotal One, the company’s main product, includes three different types of fabric services – the application fabric, the data fabric, and the cloud fabric. From the perspective of applying all these components, “a lot of consumer web companies have to run quickly” and offer 24/7 service. Pivotal is taking the best practices emerging from those needs and applying them to the enterprise.

Applying Consumer lessons in the Enterprise

Asked how Pivotal was relevant to developers, Sargent said there were a lot of things being done for developers to be more productive. He stated the company has an “incredibly deep focus on the Spring Java framework. What we’re doing with Spring 4 is enabling you to build an application easier than ever before, with a small amount of configurations.” Hadoop is hard to program, he said, and Spring XD “will make it easier and faster to build apps that work with these Big Data sources.”

Pivotal aims on making Spring better and better for developers, including making the process of getting started with Spring as easy as it is for Python, Ruby or other languages. “We want to look at these other new languages and make sure that our experience is at least as good as theirs,” he added.

“What I like about Velocity is it’s focused on solving a particular problem – building a faster, stronger web,” Sargent said. There are the needs of users, businesses, and IT to consider, and the challenge is to solve these problems for all of them, which cuts across a wide range of things. “Performance covers a wide range of products and service.”

Multi-cloud infrastructure: VMware, OpenStack + more

Pivotal aims to continue to work well over the VMware infrastructure, as well as Amazon, “and we will run on others as well, like OpenStack. We’re focusing on a multi-cloud infrastructure.” Another area of interest for the company is employee satisfaction, “it’s a very competitive market on the recruitment side,” Sargent explained. Pivotal One is a main focus as it’s able to give one unified platform. As the Pivotal team is made up of people coming from different companies, the company is “driving hard on becoming one team.”

Asked about the company’s stance on the emerging trend for Software-defined Everything, Sargent said “Pivotal provides software-defined application data fabric. All of our stuff comes on top of” what VMware provides.