EMC Buys Pivotal Labs
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
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.
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...
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 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.
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?
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.
Never underestimate the power of huge pile of money. Even for the filthy rich.
They do own the company that owns the majority of enterprise cloud market...
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?
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...
I feel like Pivotal gets a lot of respect from the hacker community. I wonder what kind of fallout this will have there.
http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...
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.
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.
But thing usually change, quickly, within a year or two.
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".
If Pivotal Tracker were to disappear, that would be quite the disaster for a lot of people.
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 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!
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.
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.
> Same services, same Pivotal Tracker, same industry leading development practices - now paired with more resources than ever.
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.
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.
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 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? ;)
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. :)
The scenario you described not much different from ebay buying Skype.
I suspect my comment will for ever more rank highly in Google search results for "hrirachu".