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EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

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Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#21

Post by moe »

codenerdz wrote: post #19
moe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

"...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?

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#22

Post by 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!

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#24

Post by Timothee »

moe wrote: post #18
Timothee wrote: post #4

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 mu…

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.…

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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#25

Post by crusso »

overworkedasian wrote: post #14

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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#26

Post by rmoriz »

Timothee wrote: post #4

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 mu…

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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#28

Post by edwinnathaniel »

Timothee wrote: post #24
moe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#29

Post by drumdance »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #28
Timothee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#30

Post by philodespotos »

sshconnection wrote: post #3

Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?

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.

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