Paul Maritz sits down for an interview to discuss his viewpoints on the third platform and explains how open systems are critical for the future of IT.

2. The third platform
Paul Maritz is breeding new technology for a new IT era.
by James Francis
insight # The third platform
Many have been called
visionary, but few have
really earned this label.
Yet Paul Maritz quali-fies
with even just a
cursory glance of his resume. It includes
spearheading the creation of Windows 95,
Windows NT and Internet Explorer, at one
point rising to the third-highest executive in
Microsoft, only behind Steve Ballmer and Bill
Gates. Later, Maritz would assume a big role
at EMC, where he soon took the reigns of
VMware and guided it into the transforma-tive
technology it is today. When Microsoft’s
CEO succession came up, Maritz was even
rumoured as a candidate.
But the man who grew up in Zimbabwe
and South Africa has turned his focus on
what he considers the new generation in
computing: The third platform.
“Generally, big waves of change in tech-nology
are occasioned by something be-coming
Tech revolution
Paul Maritz says traditionally, big waves of
change in technology are occasioned by
something becoming dramatically cheaper.
dramatically cheaper,” Maritz says.
“The mainframe to client-server revolution
was sparked because microprocessors
enabled CPU cycles to become cheaper.
So, all of a sudden, you could afford to
do things like a graphic user interface,
which would have been too expensive on
a mainframe. On a PC, most of the cycles
are spent just tracking the mouse. That
was unthinkable on a mainframe, but CPU
cycles are so cheap on a PC that you don’t
have to worry about it.”
The client-server era is now being bumped
by a new movement, one we’ve heard quite
a bit about. Virtualisation, the cloud, paral-lel
computing – there are many names for it.
But Maritz notes the fundamental shift: The
ability to join numerous machines together,
as well as the storage to feed them, has
become so cheap that new paradigms are
coming into play.
One app, many machines
“We’re in a platform shift and the traditional
operating system, like Windows or Linux, is
becoming less interesting. The innovation
is being done at a different level. If you look
at the traditional operating system, its job
is to control the resources of an individual
machine and allow individual applications
to run on that machine. What’s interesting
about the cloud and the fundamental force
enabling new use cases and new applica-tions
is that it’s not about individual ma-chines,
but a group working together.”
Maritz notes the modern trailblazers of
the field: Internet companies like Google,
Facebook and Amazon already operate
massive networks that empower applica-tions
exploring this distributed power.
“Google and Facebook could not work
on an individual machine. No mainframe
or computer is powerful enough to be able
to do what they did. There are now appli-cations
in the enterprise world that require
that approach, not quite at the Google
scale, but certainly beyond the scale of
client-server resources.”
He cites an example: Mobile operators
walk a line between customer interaction
and running a network, yet the two areas
rarely communicate with each other. The
growing analytics culture can remedy this
and give contextual information about
a customer.
“But to do that you’ll need to build huge
amounts of data being analysed at real-time.
That’s no small feat. One client we’re
working with has over a million events
coming off their network – every second.”
September 2014 brainstorm 41

3. Third platform numbers
September 2014 brainstorm 43
To this end, Maritz has stepped up to lead
Pivotal, a VMware-, General Electric- and
EMC-supported company dedicated to cre-ating
the platforms of this third generation.
These are ecosystems that empower the
third platform, with a serious lean towards
open standards. In fact, Maritz sees open
systems as critical for the future of IT.
The future is open
“I believe the Linux (open OS) model will
evolve in the cloud. We’ll get a new kind
of OS for the cloud that will be adopted by
many providers. So we try to be proactive
about that to gain significant industry sup-port,”
he says, referring to Cloud Foundry,
an open Platform as a Service (PaaS) with
numerous corporate heavyweights sup-porting
it.
Maritz says the future is about applica-tions.
Whereas the previous two generations
mainly (or completely) focused on digitising
internal processes (think paperwork), the
third platform involves and empowers the
end user. This is the differentiator – the rich-ness
of the application experience will be
where the rubber meets the road. So a com-pany’s
success will rely heavily on its ability
to deploy quality applications.
In such a world, proprietary systems are
a problem. Maritz cites the mainframe days,
where you used to pay a ‘tax’ to run your
suite on a given system because moving to
another system was impossible. The sec-ond
generation evolved this idea a little, but
the third platform is the tipping point. Mobile
phones, for example, are highly heteroge-neous,
hosting numerous platforms and
becoming increasingly agnostic about their
ability to run any application.
Maritz notes this movement towards ag-nosticism
is evident in how technologies
such as Javascript are evolving: “Some
new tech treats the browser as purely a
Javascript or HTML execution engine. As
long as the browser can connect to JS and
display HTML, we don’t expect it to do any-thing
else. But unlike the old days of back-end
crunching, they send the payload to the
device, where it’s recompiled. So it does a
lot of work on the client side, but the devices
today are very powerful and capable of han-dling
this.”
This new environment requires a world
where applications are not limited to propri-etary
systems, something Maritz says the
industry is catching on to: “More and more
people are coming to the realisation that the
cloud needs an open ecosystem that allows
you to move applications across clouds and
also build services that other people can
use, to sell it to different clouds.”
The connected future
Yet isn’t that a tall order considering the el-ephant
in the room: Amazon? Some com-mentators
believe that all this cloud mo-mentum,
even at Pivotal, is less vision and
more a reaction to the Amazon web ser-vice’s
growing dominance of the third plat-form.
Maritz agrees that the likes of Ama-zon
and Google can’t be ignored: “The new
ecosystems have to encompass both Ama-zon
and Google. So we’re layering Cloud
Foundry services over their platforms. The
open route doesn’t require Amazon to fail.
Instead, you can take advantage of their
platforms, but not get locked into their ser-vices.
It’s not a direct competition model.
We’re enabling the technology.”
Ditto for current operating systems: “The
old OS doesn’t go away, but just gets sub-sumed
into a bigger picture.”
So driving this future are the enabling of
end-users and the meteoring costs of paral-lel,
networked computing. As illustrated by
the mobile operator example, another factor
is the Internet of Things (IoT): “Everything in
the world will be attached to the internet and
record its data and status. All that info now
becomes available to be acted upon.”
This, says Maritz, is what motivated Gen-eral
Electric into investigating the opportu-nities
of such a connected world, and the
pitfalls of not evolving. Seeing the way, for
example, that online retail is cannibalising
brick-and-mortar operations, GE has poured
a lot into wrapping its head around the IoT,
including its investment in Pivotal.
“They need new business models for
clients, so it became a priority to build the
new models for this world. And almost every
other industry we talk to is involved in this.”
It’s not an entirely new concept – Pivotal
already has established competition in com-panies
such as Apprenda and arguably
BlackBerry’s Project Ion. But this is one
case where too many cooks may not re-ally
be a problem. Instead, it indicates the
way the tide is turning. And Maritz is not
concerned, providing the focus remains on
delivering the best applications, not wring-ing
hands over platform ringfencing.
“History teaches us that a well-formed
open ecosystem is a very powerful ap-proach,”
he says.
Some commentators believe that all this cloud
momentum is less vision and more a reaction to the Amazon
web service’s growing dominance of the third platform.
insight # The third platform
Google Search
5.9 billion search
requests per day
Facebook
300 petabytes
of data processed daily
Amazon S3
One trillion objects stored
Akamai DDC
20 Petabytes of data
processed daily