We had the opportunity to attend Pivotal’s yearly user conference of the Spring developer community. SpringOne, held in San Francisco December 4th till 7th 2017 at Moscone West. With about 3000 attendees it is the best attended Pivotal conference every, a proof point for the popularity of the Pivotal products.

[I am writing this blog post after attending the analyst summit on Monday, and attending Tuesday at the conference – more news is coming out and I may revise my judgement at that point.]

 

Prefer to watch – here is the video summary (if it doesn’t show up – find it on my YouTube Channel here).
 


Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
 


Want to read on? Here you go: 
 
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) 2.0 is here – Pivotal thought that so much substantial work has happened on Cloud Foundry recently, that it is worth to rev a release number, making it PCF 2.0. And certainly, the addition of Kubernetes support (announced in August, now GA) with PKS, the announcement of serverless capabilities (Pivotal Function Service – PFS), the integration of VMware NSX-T stack for networking and security – all make this a lot of new functionality. In combination with support for Microsoft Azure Stack, more support for Windows containers (like auto-scaling) and access to Google Cloud platform services more additional capabilities are added … and partners are flocking to PCF, the most prominent being IBM, adding Open Liberty as an embedded server option to Spring Boot, commercial support for IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty Buildpack in PCF and better integration to a whole plethora of IBM product and services. 

 
Mee opens SpringOne


Pivotal moves into Serverless – No surprise, Pivotal announced its serverless plans, that supposingly materialize in across 2018. Serverless is powerful for enterprises to build and operate their next generation applications, and in order to keep enterprises and developers happy, Pivotal had to come up with its own serverless alternative. It looks architected well, with the usual Pivotal suite integration (Rabbit MQ) but also with Apache Kafka, to manage events that wake up the serverless capabilities. But it is early days - so stay tuned for more on this in the coming months.

 
If Onsie Then Emojis


Partner, partners… did I mention partners? – Enterprise software ecosystems have a fine nose when it comes to identify a vendor that has momentum, and vendors that can partner tend to flock to that vendor. Pivotal is no exception. Accenture launched a joint business unit with Pivotal, signaling the engagement of the large system integrators. The IaaS side is well represented with Google and Microsoft. Developer tools integration is happening with IBM, Microsoft and many more. Tech stack integration is happening with IBM and others. The Dell EMC keiretsu was there with Dell EMC (an on-premise version to run PCF), Virtustream (running PCF for you) and VMware (NSX most prominent). And many startups like e.g. Datadog, Solace etc. Year over year – since SpringOne in Las Vegas last year, I’d say the ecosystem has doubled in presence and efforts.

 
And yes - a new Spring Banner is unveiled
 

MyPOV

Pivotal is on a roll when it comes to Cloud Foundry and Spring. Enterprises want (and need) to build next generation applications fast, and they naturally look for frameworks (Spring) to help them on a platform (Cloud Foundry). This created the “2nd spring for Spring” as I stated a year ago (see here) - which otherwise was a developer community slowly fading away… not anymore and good to see the revival. Serverless is an important innovation for Pivotal to keep new type of workloads in the fold… we now have to see how it materializes in a few quarters from now. Almost ironically there were more Cloud Foundry announcements than Spring announcements – at least on the first day when I attended. The audience did not seem to bother, enterprises and developers know that at the end of the day, that the platform comes first.

On the concern side, while it was almost refreshing not to hear a mention of Machine Learning / AI at a conference in 2017, it still means that Pivotal will have to give its customers and users a solution in this important space. But fair enough, serverless first. Equally the BigData / Hadoop relationship is not mended with the leading vendors, given Pivotal’ s database history… but better to fix this sooner than later… and the only IaaS hold outs to come to the same level as Google, IBM and Microsoft have been AWS and Oracle… but it is likely that Pivotal is out to get those players in 2018. The ecosystem and success that Pivotal has been able to create around Cloud Foundry is too much of an attraction not to be part of the party.

Overall great momentum for Pivotal, good innovation and announcements for both Cloud Foundry and Spring. Excited and eager customers, increased partner interest are all good signs that all is well in Pivotal land. Stay tuned.

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here). And a Storify collection of the analyst summit can be found here.
 
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

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