General Electric pours $105 MEEELION into Pivotal Initiative

General Electric is pouring $105m into Pivotal, a skunkworks cloud and big data company spun-out of VMware and EMC.

The investment was announced on Wednesday, several hours before Pivotal held its coming out party first major press conference.

"It's no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business transformation," Bill Ruh, leader of GE's global software center, said in a canned statement. "They are enabling the Industrial Internet."

GE is betting that Pivotal has the best tech in town for analyzing and commanding the millions of sensors and actuators that industrial giants like GE, contemporaries Honeywell, and others are busily putting into all their new devices.

Pivotal was formed in December, 2012, out of some of VMware and EMC's key technologies, including their platform-as-a-service Cloud Foundry, Greenplum data warehousing units, and some of their top big data (that's Hadoop to you and me) technicians. The spin-off is run by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

Some of the company's products include Pivotal One – a full scale-out software stack for massive data crunching, containing middle ware, management, analytics, Hadoop tech, and the Cloud Foundry PaaS.

What Pivotal is working on "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," he said.

More details will be given on the investment at an event in San Francisco, which we will be reporting from. ®