VMware Spin-off Pivotal To Invest £100m In Tech City

Communications minister Ed Vaizey and Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz have opened a London office for Pivotal, the Big Data firm which is spinning off from VMware. The company will employ 75 people and invest up to £100 million over the next ten years, supporting startups using agile development practices.

Pivotal is a $1 billion initiative, offering Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Big Data, as well as agile development tools. It is formed from elements spun out of VMware, and backed by VMware and its parent EMC as well as General Electric. Microsoft veteran and former VMware CEO Paul Maritz is leading the charge, and came to the London division’s new Tech City office for a celebratory office-warming, also attended by Communications Minister Ed Vaizey.

Tech City is open for business

“Tech City is a big signal that Britain is open for business,” said Vaizey. Questioned about developments outside London, he promised a sort of “trickle-out” phenomenon. While Tech City focuses attention on London, its chief executive Joanna Shields is working with a network of tech clusters round the country, he said: “This is really important.”

Vaizey also took the opportunity to list the  tech-friendly initiatives the Government has supported, such as tax credits, enterpreneur visas, the London Stock Exchange high-growth segment and the opening up of government IT contracts. “A critical mass is developing,” he added.

Paul Maritz said Pivotal chose London because of the young people who work in the “new era” IT – the innovation and the enterprise sector.  “Tech City is similar to Silicon Valley,” he said.

Maritz set out Pivotal’s ideas for a new wave of technology, where servers and storage a effectively “free” in the cloud and developers build freely. He predicted that companies would find ways to build on cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services without getting trapped in any particular service, as a new operating system-like  “cloud fabric” evolves.

Pivotal Labs, which made tools for agile software development, forms the core of Pivotal, but VMware has added its vFabric cloud services, as well as its Gemfire data management and big data analytics products.

Typical Pivotal Labs customers were at the opening: peer-to-peer lending body Funding Circle and training organisation Skills Matter. Pivotal itself is seeking large customers through consultancy partner CapGemini, which announced a deal with the firm earlier this week to help companies deal with – and possibly fish from – what Maritz calls their “data lakes”.

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