Published on the 21/11/2014 | Written by Beverley Head

Cloud computing is no longer simply delivering enterprises with a new way of managing their information systems, its generating entirely new business models according to Paul Maritz…

Paul Maritz has been a part of the technology landscape since the late 1970s, working at companies including Burroughs, Intel, Microsoft, EMC and VMware and is now CEO of 18 month old Pivotal. The company was set up by EMC and VMware, with a 10 percent stake from GE, in order to provide a platform for companies wanting to make use of big data on an open cloud platform.

On a visit to Sydney this week Maritz said, “we are on the threshold of all the machines in the world being connected to the internet,” and that companies which were able to harness the information from those machines could radically reform themselves. Besides delivering much more compelling end user experiences by better understanding customer preferences based on big data analysis it would be possible for enterprises such as electricity generators to take telemetry feeds from electricity turbines to understand whether they could be safely ratcheted up to increase production without requiring additional investment.

Maritz said that Pivotal was also working with Monsanto to understand how agricultural sensors could be deployed, and the data analysed to improve yields. “You could improve crop yields by 10 percent with no more water, fertilizer or land,” if fine-grained data was available for analysis in near real time he claimed.

“I was there when the industry made the shift from the mainframe to client server and web 1.0. But that was not as profound as the shift we are seeing now,” according to Maritz.

“We spent 15 years trying to automate the workflow of white collar workers. But in many ways that was not a revolution…we were just making business models and people more efficient.

“Now we are in a situation of technological revolution, a fundamental change in business models and boundaries.”

That required a different approach to technology investment he said, advocating lower cost, scalable cloud platforms rather than in-house monolithic systems which would not be able to handle the processing of data from millions of events per second that would need analysis.

But he warned that the cloud needed to be open to ensure that organisations weren’t locked in and restricted in terms of access to innovation. Pivotal has been involved in the development of Cloud Foundry – which Maritz this week described as an open operating system for clouds. That he said would very shortly be released into the hands of a non-profit open source organisations.

“Open source is not important because it’s free but because that is where the real innovation and profound effects are going to happen,” said Maritz.