
EMC Buys Pivotal Labs - michaelfairley
http://gigaom.com/cloud/exclusive-emc-buys-pivotal-labs/
======
Timothee
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.

~~~
moe
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...](http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of-a-
petabyte-chart.jpg)

~~~
Timothee
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.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
"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.

~~~
drumdance
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.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
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?

~~~
tptacek
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%.

------
xoebus
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-pivotal-
increased-velocity)

~~~
benackles
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>

~~~
jackowayed
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.

~~~
hboon
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.

------
mhartl
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.)

------
sshconnection
Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?

~~~
Timothee
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.

~~~
jes5199
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

~~~
apinstein
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.

~~~
orblivion
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?

~~~
apinstein
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!

------
ajays
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.

------
MitziMoto
As an EMC Employee, I just hope they let us use Pivotal Tracker!

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qq66
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.

------
mikecarlton
Great, another useful service for them to destroy. Mozy was very good, but
went downhill after being bought by EMC.

------
overworkedasian
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".

~~~
crusso
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.

~~~
overworkedasian
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.

------
derwiki
Wonder what this will do for existing engagements.

------
dabit
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.

------
tlogan
Does anybody know what will happen with Pivotal Tracker? Will it be shut down?

------
cmalpeli
EMC also has a consulting division - so perhaps plans to integrate it there?
<http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm>

------
milkshakes
Sounds like a new vacuum is about to open in a highly demanded space.

~~~
johnx123-up
I'm sure Asian companies have already ventured into it
<http://fundprojectswith.me/>

------
2pasc
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!

------
nivertech
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? ;)

~~~
geoffschmidt
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.

~~~
the_paul
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. :)

------
tbsdy
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!

~~~
wpietri
I am weirdly excited that there is exactly one Google hit for the word
"hrirachu".

~~~
tbsdy
Yeah, I saw that... I wrote this from my iPad and didn't notice the typo till
way too late :-)

I suspect my comment will for ever more rank highly in Google search results
for "hrirachu".

