EMC Buys Pivotal Labs(gigaom.com)
gigaom.com
EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
http://gigaom.com/cloud/exclusive-emc-buys-pivotal-labs/
67 comments
Desperation.
Storage vendors are between a rock and a hard place these days because their business has been commoditized.
The huge storage deployments of today are not running on EMC or NetApp anymore. They are running on arrays of beige boxes, for good reasons[1].
At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace. And they don't really know where to go from here.
(the CDN market is a another example for this phenomena btw; Hi Akamai! How many auxiliary products have you invented today?)
[1] http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of...
Storage vendors are between a rock and a hard place these days because their business has been commoditized.
The huge storage deployments of today are not running on EMC or NetApp anymore. They are running on arrays of beige boxes, for good reasons[1].
At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace. And they don't really know where to go from here.
(the CDN market is a another example for this phenomena btw; Hi Akamai! How many auxiliary products have you invented today?)
[1] http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of...
I could see that from EMC's point of view. But Pivotal would still have to accept their offer and I'm thinking they had no difficulties finding clients and the owners probably had enough money to retire already.
EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money. The vision that EMC sold them on is what would give them the assurance that Picotal is not selling just to die there.
EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money. The vision that EMC sold them on is what would give them the assurance that Picotal is not selling just to die there.
"You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true.
You'll never know how easy/hard it is to find clients as a consulting company as big and probably as expensive as Pivotal. Maybe at some point the business model isn't as good as it could have been. Maybe potential clients balked down. Maybe the sales cycle is long enough that the profit has become marginal.
You'll never know how easy/hard it is to find clients as a consulting company as big and probably as expensive as Pivotal. Maybe at some point the business model isn't as good as it could have been. Maybe potential clients balked down. Maybe the sales cycle is long enough that the profit has become marginal.
Consulting is also a real PITA management-wise. You have to map billable hours to available resources, sometimes even unavailable resources you haven't even hired yet. That's really hard to scale.
Indeed.
Managing human-resources to make every single second profitable is hard.
Not to mention the varieties of technology out there: some people use Erlang, Haskell, Node.JS, bunch of NoSQL, Python while Pivotal is more known as the Agile, Ruby, and probably Java to some extend.
Also, we don't know what the startup owners/CEOs want; they could come to Pivotal with unreasonable requirement: cloud-scale or money back guarantee?
Managing human-resources to make every single second profitable is hard.
Not to mention the varieties of technology out there: some people use Erlang, Haskell, Node.JS, bunch of NoSQL, Python while Pivotal is more known as the Agile, Ruby, and probably Java to some extend.
Also, we don't know what the startup owners/CEOs want; they could come to Pivotal with unreasonable requirement: cloud-scale or money back guarantee?
It's easy to make every second of the business profitable without making every second of every consultant's day profitable. Most well-run consultancies have target utilization rates way south of 100%.
"You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true.
Absolutely! I wanted to add a disclaimer that I have no idea how it really goes on the inside, but my bus stop was coming up. :)
My comment in this thread are all from the perception I have of EMC and Pivotal Labs.
Absolutely! I wanted to add a disclaimer that I have no idea how it really goes on the inside, but my bus stop was coming up. :)
My comment in this thread are all from the perception I have of EMC and Pivotal Labs.
> EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money.
Never underestimate the power of huge pile of money. Even for the filthy rich.
Never underestimate the power of huge pile of money. Even for the filthy rich.
Or it was a shocking amount of money that made a lot of people rich. Its one thing for the few top guys to make money. If EMC minted lots of millionaires, thats another.
"...At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace. And they don't really know where to go from here..."
They do own the company that owns the majority of enterprise cloud market...
They do own the company that owns the majority of enterprise cloud market...
...which is being commoditized as well.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think EMC is going anywhere soon. But their days of fat margins by the virtue of vendor-lockin are numbered.
They're obviously trying to get moving with acquisitions like this. But one can only wonder how on earth pivotal (~100 employees) is supposed to beat 30years of BigCo inertia out of ~50k employees - if that's the idea behind this.
Are they trying to rebuild Rome with lego bricks?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think EMC is going anywhere soon. But their days of fat margins by the virtue of vendor-lockin are numbered.
They're obviously trying to get moving with acquisitions like this. But one can only wonder how on earth pivotal (~100 employees) is supposed to beat 30years of BigCo inertia out of ~50k employees - if that's the idea behind this.
Are they trying to rebuild Rome with lego bricks?
Since the turn of the century, EMC have purchased something like 80 companies. Almost all of them outside of storage related companies have had issues, or have been dropped. If you are in a company that gets bought by EMC, my suggestion is to start looking for another company to work for!
My thought was also: "Would. Not. Have. Guessed. That."
But, in light of (EMC subsidiary) VMWare's acquisitions, it makes a bit more sense. They've been beefing up on all sorts of software-development teams and tools. They own SpringSource, and picked up a bunch of other companies last year:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/12/a-year-of-vmware-a...
But, in light of (EMC subsidiary) VMWare's acquisitions, it makes a bit more sense. They've been beefing up on all sorts of software-development teams and tools. They own SpringSource, and picked up a bunch of other companies last year:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/12/a-year-of-vmware-a...
Maybe EMC is planning to reintegrate VMware. VMware already bought a lot of tech companies in the cloud and development space. To go into a competition with a subsidiary firm does not make any sense.
IBM went through a transition from machines to services, it wouldn't surprise me if EMC were trying to get into services this way.
They've already been in services ala IBM for a number of years.
I've never heard of Pivotal Labs but perhaps they're competent in big data backed web apps. I work in the data center monitoring space (actually power systems simulations) and I've created a SVG based web app for power system simulation and monitoring visualization, and it's garnered interest from big traditional players in this space.
offtopic: is SVG buggy in Google Chrome? I found a lot of bugs (crashes) playing with big graphs in d3.
That's not been my experience, but the D3 work I've ran in Chrome has been on the small side.
I was very surprised by this too. It sounds like EMC is trying to establish some kind of legitimacy in the startup world.
I feel like Pivotal gets a lot of respect from the hacker community. I wonder what kind of fallout this will have there.
I feel like Pivotal gets a lot of respect from the hacker community. I wonder what kind of fallout this will have there.
Pivotal Labs CEO Rob Mee just posted a short message on his company blog about the acquisition :
http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...
http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...
Every time a company is acquired, they say the same thing about how their larger parent is going to bring them greater resources and distribution. In reality, almost every company experiences the exact opposite effect. The early adopters and passionate base often leave and the company wallows in the murk of bureaucratic org charts.
I think the stories of what happens a few years after the acquisition are much more informative. Given their involvement in the Ruby on Rails community, I'm sure within 3 years we'll see this story show up as a 37signals Exit Interview.
http://37signals.com/exit
I think the stories of what happens a few years after the acquisition are much more informative. Given their involvement in the Ruby on Rails community, I'm sure within 3 years we'll see this story show up as a 37signals Exit Interview.
http://37signals.com/exit
There are notable exceptions. Heroku is still shipping awesome new stuff at a rapid clip under their Salesforce overlords. I don't know directly, but the plan at acquisition time was that they would stay pretty independent. I would guess that that helps a lot.
I think Pivotal could be one of those. Him saying "same services" suggests that EMC isn't planning on absorbing the team into something else. It helps that Pivotal is (presumably) very profitable, so there's value to leaving it alone instead of just viewing it as a source of a ton of great devs.
If it's still really Pivotal, and it just happens to be owned by EMC, they might fade much slower than the "everyone leaves within a year and a half" that we've seen so many times.
I think Pivotal could be one of those. Him saying "same services" suggests that EMC isn't planning on absorbing the team into something else. It helps that Pivotal is (presumably) very profitable, so there's value to leaving it alone instead of just viewing it as a source of a ton of great devs.
If it's still really Pivotal, and it just happens to be owned by EMC, they might fade much slower than the "everyone leaves within a year and a half" that we've seen so many times.
There are notable exceptions, but in every case of acquisition in the enterprise software space, the PR after the acquisition will always say things will remain the same, it will remain a standalone subsidiary.
But thing usually change, quickly, within a year or two.
But thing usually change, quickly, within a year or two.
There are exceptions, but only as an anomaly. Also, that doesn't really get at what's wrong with each of these exiting thoughts. Did Heroku keep shipping as a result or in spite of selling their company?
I'm not arguing against the practice of acquisitions. However, when a HUGE company buys a small team (famous for agile development) I find it hard to believe statements arguing that more resources are going to lead to "increased velocity".
I'm not arguing against the practice of acquisitions. However, when a HUGE company buys a small team (famous for agile development) I find it hard to believe statements arguing that more resources are going to lead to "increased velocity".
Of course there are exceptions. Reddit is a pretty good one of the parent not killing the acquisition. Although it's spun out again. It definitely grew immensely under Conde Nast and wasn't quashed.
case in point:
LiveJournal / Six Apart
http://news.livejournal.com/82926.html
This is a head-scratcher for me, but I know a bunch of current and former Pivotal Labs peeps (including CEO Rob Mee), and they're some of the smartest, savviest hackers around. I'm confident that this will end up making sense and will prove to be a good move for both parties. (I practically live inside Pivotal Tracker, so I certainly hope so.)
Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?
That's when open-sourcing vs. closing it down (if that were to happen) would be fantastic. (cf. one HN discussion from today about that)
If Pivotal Tracker were to disappear, that would be quite the disaster for a lot of people.
If Pivotal Tracker were to disappear, that would be quite the disaster for a lot of people.
I use Tracker and find it to be a major pain. It's close enough to the tool that I actually need that it's useful, but then it gets opinionated and makes certain things impossible.
For example: "chores" skip the verification state. So I don't use them anymore.
and the fact that "stories" can't actually track their own prerequisites, it's really to accidentally lose your sequencing information
For example: "chores" skip the verification state. So I don't use them anymore.
and the fact that "stories" can't actually track their own prerequisites, it's really to accidentally lose your sequencing information
We switched from tracker to Planbox about 6 months ago and have been thrilled. Same general model as tracker with better execution. It's a young product so there are still some issues but it's clearly heading in the right direction. They also have an import from tracker so it's painless to try out.
I'm annoyed by Pivotal's interface too, but the intro video from Planbox didn't really impress me much (maybe because I work at a really small company and that level of hierarchy and customization probably isn't relevant to us.) Do you have any particular examples of what it does better than Pivotal?
I came to loathe the columnar setup of Pivotal. I found myself constantly rearranging the interface just to be able to work.
We have a lot of project and subprojects here, and Planbox's hierarchy (there is basically one more level than in Tracker) is really useful. Their UX for slicing and dicing based on person, label, project, etc is also nice. The search is faster (it's all client side so it's practically instant). The charts make more sense to me. It doesn't treat stories as a unit of work; rather they are a goal. Thus all of the tasks in Planbox can be individually assigned to different people and estimated and time-tracked at that same level of granularity.
Overall I just found that there were a lot of things I was hacking around in Pivotal, and frankly I didn't even notice it. It's only when we hired a couple of people and they pointed out frustrations with Pivotal that I started looking around. When I started using Planbox, that's when I really realized how much I was adjusting myself to the limitations of Pivotal. I find myself much less stressed managing things via Planbox.
Hope that helps!
We have a lot of project and subprojects here, and Planbox's hierarchy (there is basically one more level than in Tracker) is really useful. Their UX for slicing and dicing based on person, label, project, etc is also nice. The search is faster (it's all client side so it's practically instant). The charts make more sense to me. It doesn't treat stories as a unit of work; rather they are a goal. Thus all of the tasks in Planbox can be individually assigned to different people and estimated and time-tracked at that same level of granularity.
Overall I just found that there were a lot of things I was hacking around in Pivotal, and frankly I didn't even notice it. It's only when we hired a couple of people and they pointed out frustrations with Pivotal that I started looking around. When I started using Planbox, that's when I really realized how much I was adjusting myself to the limitations of Pivotal. I find myself much less stressed managing things via Planbox.
Hope that helps!
Only people who run their business on a random startup webapp. I wish amazon or Google would externalities their pro quality trackers, though.
Having just quit Amazon and knowing firsthand the disaster that was project tracking, this comment amuses me. There is no "pro quality tracker" at Amazon.
There is no such thing as a 'pro quality' tracker.
They ALL suck, in different ways, and simply try to minimize their deficiencies based on the context they were developed in.
You find the one that fits your world view and your work flow, and put up with the annoyances and oddities, or try to paper over them with hacks and service hooks.
They ALL suck, in different ways, and simply try to minimize their deficiencies based on the context they were developed in.
You find the one that fits your world view and your work flow, and put up with the annoyances and oddities, or try to paper over them with hacks and service hooks.
Amazon had tools, but not every team used them.
I loved the tool Haakon wrote.
And there was actually a great third party open source tool back in 2009, whose name I forget, that was bizarre abandoned.
It's not like Pivotal sets a high bar. It doesn't even have a notion of progress, and it has that ridiculous multi column layout so you can't easily use a screen to look at a task. And it runs on a random startup webserver that can be turned off at any moment.
It's not like Pivotal sets a high bar. It doesn't even have a notion of progress, and it has that ridiculous multi column layout so you can't easily use a screen to look at a task. And it runs on a random startup webserver that can be turned off at any moment.
The CEO posted something on their blog: http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...
> Same services, same Pivotal Tracker, same industry leading development practices - now paired with more resources than ever.
> Same services, same Pivotal Tracker, same industry leading development practices - now paired with more resources than ever.
Switch to Trello. It's practically the same thing, but far less opinionated/religious.
Trello is great, the interface makes me a lot happier than Pivotal, but I think it's more suited for something like a big data collection and processing project, where you have a lot of little pieces to keep track of. It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development. Correct me if I'm wrong though, please.
BTW I thought I read someone comment somewhere about being able to split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that? That's one thing that I thought would make Pivotal much better.
BTW I thought I read someone comment somewhere about being able to split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that? That's one thing that I thought would make Pivotal much better.
> It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development.
See how the Trello team uses it: https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa113...
> split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that?
Yes. There is a "covert to card" link that appears when you click on a checklist item.
See how the Trello team uses it: https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa113...
> split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that?
Yes. There is a "covert to card" link that appears when you click on a checklist item.
One of the nice things about Pivotal Tracker was that it was opinionated in just the right ways.
That being said, I like Trello as well. I will not be surprised if Trello provides an imported for Pivotal Tracker because of the uncertainty of this news.
That being said, I like Trello as well. I will not be surprised if Trello provides an imported for Pivotal Tracker because of the uncertainty of this news.
EMC seems to be slowly building up an "enterprise software" portfolio. They bought Zimbra from Yahoo, which includes "Zimbra Collaboration Suite", a groupware. Now they've acquired Pivotal, which makes (among other things) Pivotal Tracker. I think I see a pattern here.
As an EMC Employee, I just hope they let us use Pivotal Tracker!
Pivotal Labs doesn't really have assets beyond its people, so unless this is a very large deal with strong golden handcuffs, I see it being a losing proposition as all the Pivotal guys go to Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/startups.
Great, another useful service for them to destroy. Mozy was very good, but went downhill after being bought by EMC.
EMC could have just hired them as consultants to teach them the ways of being 'more agile' with their product set. hard to find a business reason behind this other than buying them for their non tangible 'processes".
What would have been in it for the Pivotal guys to do consulting to EMC? EMC wanted a solid team of next-gen developers. My impression was that Pivotal was doing fairly well so probably insisted on a good price for their company.
Not sure man. You could be right. They could be building the foundation to build next gen apps that better mesh all the product in the EMC product portfolio. Only time will tell.
Wonder what this will do for existing engagements.
Perhaps Pivotal wins by being able to get a ton of enterprise engineers from EMC, turn them into Rubyists and scale their already very successful model. If they are profitable at ~100 employees, they would be even more profitable at ~150, ~200.
EMC also has a consulting division - so perhaps plans to integrate it there?
http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm
Sounds like a new vacuum is about to open in a highly demanded space.
I'm sure Asian companies have already ventured into it http://fundprojectswith.me/
Weird. Although I have heard that Pivotal Tracker is making very significant revenues (in the tens of millions)...this is not much for a Billion dollar Company like EMC!
This reminded me Mozy story.
EMC CEO was searching for backup software for his home PC and found Mozy. He liked it so much so he acquired company making Mozy.
Maybe this time he found Pivotal Tracker? ;)
EMC CEO was searching for backup software for his home PC and found Mozy. He liked it so much so he acquired company making Mozy.
Maybe this time he found Pivotal Tracker? ;)
Sure, but EMC and Mozy are a natural fit. It's not like he heard a really good song on the radio, and the next day EMC bought the record label.
They sound like they should be, right? Mozy did storage, EMC did storage?
But as a Mozy employee during the time of the acquisition, I'd like to state for the record how emphatically and fantastically wrong this is. There is more of a "natural fit" between Sesame Street and Godzilla's wang than there was between Mozy and EMC. :)
But as a Mozy employee during the time of the acquisition, I'd like to state for the record how emphatically and fantastically wrong this is. There is more of a "natural fit" between Sesame Street and Godzilla's wang than there was between Mozy and EMC. :)
You never know.
The scenario you described not much different from ebay buying Skype.
The scenario you described not much different from ebay buying Skype.
Well, that is the end of that company. I was involved in a very successful company that was bought by EMC (infra) and I can assure you that as soon as they bought it they forced out the founders, screwed up the support offering, stymied development efforts with layers upon layers of beurocracy (over 9 levels from the top to the bottom in the hrirachu chart - not including "dotted lines"), political appointees over solid engineering decisions and a market based approach. It wasn't just Infra, they did the same thing for nLayers, Smarts, Voyence and a raft of other companies they purchased. Morale was awful and sales didn't go up - they either stalled or went down!
Off-topic, but I was curious what "hrirachu" meant in english, and now I'm just incredibly impressed by DuckDuckGo:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hrirachu
http://www.google.com/search?q=hrirachu
It's just that EMC and Pivotal Labs to me represents kind of opposites in the spectrum: EMC is the established old-school hardware company, while Pivotal Labs is the cool software consultancy that the cool startups hire for web-apps. So that pairing feels odd. I'm curious to know what is the goal behind that…
"Bringing agile methodologies to the enterprise" doesn't make much sense: would EMC be interested in making consulting money for agile training? That doesn't seem to be at the same scale of the rest of the business…
And "hardware as a service" sound like it would be more suited for veterans from the cloud providers they might want to compete with.
Surprising to say the least.