General Electric (GE), a US-listed industrial conglomerate, has invested $104m for 10% of Pivotal, a spin-out from data and cloud services provider EMC/VMware.
A GE insider said the deal was struck by its software centre’s business development team, which does venture capital, mergers and acquisitions and major partnerships, but, “since it was such a large deal, it’s not considered GE Ventures for the purpose of budget, but it went through the same channels”.
GE’s software centre will use Pivotal’s technologies as a standard source for delivering data analytics and cloud architecture.
Paul Maritz, chief executive of Pivotal and former chief strategist of EMC and chief executive of its VMware subsidiary, said “We are experiencing a major change in the wide-scale move to cloud computing, which includes both infrastructure and the transformation of how applications will be built and used based on cloud and mobility.
“This transformation is also happening in enterprises where their environments must adapt to a world that is data-centric, requires agility and real-time response. As one of the world’s largest industrial companies, GE’s investment underscores the profound change in business and the historic opportunity that Pivotal has in delivering a new platform to help GE’s customers succeed.”
Bill Ruh, vice-president of GE Global Software Center, added: “It’s no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business transformation enabling an industrial internet.
“At the heart of it is that machines can be intelligent, connected, and that we can use software to analyze the information coming out of them. To support this next frontier requires an architectural shift in how our services are built and delivered. Pivotal is creating a platform that brings the best of the internet – rapid application development, data analytics and cloud architecture – to enterprises.
“This is aligned with many of the things we are doing at GE to help accelerate our delivery of innovation, and to bring a productivity revolution that will have a positive impact on all of us.”