Pivotal Software is in the early stages of creating a channel around its distribution of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service environment for building and deploying applications.
Revealed at the Dell Technologies World 2017 conference, the Channel Lighthouse initiative will focus on a handful of partners that have the expertise required to support a comprehensive IT platform, says Chad Sakac, senior vice president for the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and the Dell Technology Alliance at Pivotal. PKS is an instance of a Kubernetes container engine optimized for VMware environments.
Before joining Pivotal, Sakac has been head of the Converged Platforms and Solutions Division within Dell EMC. That division was folded into the bigger Dell server and storage business units.
Sakac told conference attendees that Pivotal Software only has 130 salespeople in North America. The goal is leverage channel partners to expand that footprint, says Sakac.
Today a large percentage of the services required to install Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) are provided by Pivotal. But Pivotal would prefer not to be in the services business, says Sakac. Channel partners stand to benefit because PCF generates a significant services opportunity, adds Sakac.
“Every dollar of software creates a huge services and infrastructure drag,” says Sakac.
Following an initial public offering last month Pivotal Software is now valued at $4 billion. But usage of Cloud Foundry has generally been limited to Fortune 100 companies that mainly rely on it to deploy complex 12-factor applications. The future of Cloud Foundry is also less than clear. The rise of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform has resulted in rivals such as Red Hat embracing Kubernetes reduce the underlying complexity associated with standing up a PaaS environment. There are also several container-as-a-service (CaaS) environments starting to emerge as lightweight alternatives to PaaS environments. Today it can require over 40 virtual machines to deploy Cloud Foundry.
The Cloud Foundry community is divided to what degree to embrace Kubernetes, beyond pledging to support Kubernetes run-times alongside Cloud Foundry. The primary framework Pivotal relies on for build applications in Cloud Foundry is Spring, which is based on Java. The Spring framework is popular with developers for building a range of Java applications. But as the Java platform transforms into a Jakarta EE platform under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation, which is leading the charge on the developed of Eclipse MicroProfile, a framework jointly developed by IBM and Red Hat. Along with Oracle, it’s expected the Eclipse Foundation will rally developers around Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile.
In the meantime, Sakac signaled that Pivotal and VMware would collaborate on the building of a serverless computing framework based on Spring, containers and the VMware software-defined data center platform. But at the moment only Pivotal and VMware are actively using a BOSH framework originally developed by the CFF to deploy a container platform.
It may be a while before the channel plays a significant role in furthering the adoption of Cloud Foundry. But Pivotal at the very least appears determined to jumpstart that transition.
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