Pivotal, the buzzed-about Big Data venture that was spun out of EMC and VMware earlier this year, is attempting to marry the power of Hadoop with the elasticity of the open cloud.

The company’s newly unveiled Pivotal One platform is the culmination of $105 million in funding, months of work by hundreds of engineers and a formidable lineup of enterprise-proven assets from its parent companies. The suite is founded on Pivotal CF, a beefed-up version of Cloud Foundry that enables organizations to stretch their Big Data deployments across multiple providers without having to invest in costly optimizations for each individual environment.

Besides simplifying the implementation of multi-cloud clusters, Pivotal One also provides a comprehensive Linux runtime environment and a set of services for processing data on-demand. The most notable of these is the Pivotal HD distribution of Apache Hadoop, which can be scaled up and down as needed and assigned resources such as HDFS storage capacity on the fly.

“Today we are proud to introduce Pivotal One, comprised of Pivotal CF and the first set of Pivotal One services, which will empower businesses to create applications and deliver new features to customers at a velocity and scale previously only available to Internet giants,” commented Paul Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal. “We are bringing this speed and scale to some of the most important companies in the world, each of which can now better use data and analytics to build applications and products that have a profound impact on our daily lives.”

Pivotal HD is complemented by a self-service analytics environment dubbed AX, the RabbitMQ message brokering service and MySQL integration. The toolkit is designed to lower the barrier of entry into Hadoop and reduce development times by eliminating the complexities associated with more proprietary platforms such as AWS. Or, at least, that’s the plan.

“The core Pivotal Cloud Foundry and the various other Pivotal One components each has a following among developers. However, the platform as a whole is immature and lacks the tight integration of AWS. Integrating the various pieces from different sources, including other EMC acquisitions, into a cohesive whole will require proprietary APIs and other code that will create problems for users who want to move the finished applications built on Pivotal One in-house,”  Wikibon’s Bert Latamore pointed out in his latest article.