EMC’s Big Data Venture Pivotal Cosies Up With CapGemini

Pivotal, the Big Data firm which EMC is spinning off as a “billion dollar startup”, has teamed up with consultants CapGemini to develop and support its offerings which it describes as a “business data lake”.

CapGemini will be working with Pivotal to take the concepts of Big Data, platform-as-a-service and agile development, and turn them into something billable and bankable. The two companies will be pitching the ability to combine legacy data with new sources, and to provide robust analytics.

EMC bought Pivotal Labs in 2012, and has put Microsoft and EMC veteran Paul Maritz in charge. Other partners including EMC subsidiary VMware and GE have invested in Pivotal and it has started to deliver products such as Pivotal One, a multi-cloud enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) offering.

Big things are expected from Maritz, who was CEO of VMware from 2008 to 2002, and was head of Microsoft’s platforms up until 2ooo, and reckoned to be third-ranking executive after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

CapGemini will train up to 500 Pivotal experts at a new centre of excellence in CapGemini’s business information management centre in India, and place a leadership team at Pivotal’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

The new era of “information centric computing” requires companies to work together, said Maritz in a statement: “This is why we are working with Capgemini, a market leader in business analytics, around the Business Data Lake. This new offer represents our belief that the future of information insight within enterprises requires a new operating model, as both data volumes increase and real-time intelligent-response becomes a necessity of doing business.”

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