Published on the 08/04/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Australian and New Zealand companies are being offered the chance to access Pivotal’s Singapore-based innovation centre to use agile methods and Pivotal technologies to prototype big data applications…
Pivotal – the one-year old start-up with an impeccable pedigree courtesy of its parents and investors EMC, VMware and GE – has announced a cloud-based suite of big data tools intended to provide everything that an organisation needs to get started with big data on a subscription basis.
The company also announced that its Singapore-based innovation centre, which uses Agile development techniques to rapidly prototype analytics solutions, is open for business from ANZ organisations. Some of the 200 staff associated with that centre are already located in ANZ according to Melissa Ries, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific Japan. She said that Pivotal’s intent was to “Help companies create a new class of applications that can leverage data in a cloud-independent way.”
Scott Yara, Pivotal’s president and head of products, was in Australia last week and also focused on the need for companies to be able to use any cloud services they want, rather than be locked into just one.
During his visit Yara held a series of meetings with local enterprises, including a swag of large banks which are exploring big data and analytics. The company has just hired a local managing director for ANZ, Gavin Jones, who said financial services companies, telcos and government were the early sales targets for the company.
Yara said that Pivotal was “about bringing together three unique capabilities” – firstly technology able to deliver “open platform as a service”. Underpinned by VMware’s Cloud Foundry which he described as akin to a cloud operating system, this would allow data to be moved around different clouds.
Second was the need for data driven cloud applications. “Big data is fundamental to the next wave of cloud computing…and will power the next wave of applications.”
Finally he stressed the need for agile development and data services.
Yara acknowledged that although technologies were emerging to support big data analytics a limiting factor in terms of deployment remained access to skills. This scarcity is itself spurring innovation – Qrious, for example, is a New Zealand start-up partly funded by Telecom Digital Ventures which is aiming to establish use-cases for big data and analytics and pilot them, turning data into a valuable asset class along the way.
The company which has estimated New Zealand alone has a shortfall of 1,200 data scientists is also planning to establish a data science academy that can train commercially useful data scientists.
