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EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

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Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#31

Post by edwinnathaniel »

drumdance wrote: post #29
edwinnathaniel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#32

Post by tptacek »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #31
drumdance wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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%.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#33

Post by benackles »

xoebus wrote: post #27

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...

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

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#34

Post by Drbble »

Timothee wrote: post #10
sshconnection wrote: post #3

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.

Only people who run their business on a random startup webapp. I wish amazon or Google would externalities their pro quality trackers, though.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#35

Post by rjurney »

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.

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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#36

Post by AndyKelley »

Drbble wrote: post #34
Timothee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#37

Post by Timothee »

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.

"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.

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#38

Post by 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!

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#39

Post by jes5199 »

Timothee wrote: post #10
sshconnection wrote: post #3

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.

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

Re: EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

#40

Post by 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? ;)

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