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Comment by Timothee | Hacker News Reader

My first reaction was to say "wtf" out loud.

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.

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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...

"...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...

...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?

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!

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.

"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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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.

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