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Pivotal Software S-1

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Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#101

Post by tyingq »

theossuary wrote: post #68

It's interesting how much the filing seems to revolve around PCF. I played with PCF a few years ago and was really unimpressed. More recently I've been consulting with firms using PCF and the devops guys there seem to really like it and Bosh, so it may have gotten better at least. That said, I just can't understand why you'd ever pick PCF over Kubernetes. Sure, I get one deploys application code, and the other deploy…

Right. Similar with Amazon. Both seem to recognize that K8S is going to take over the market, so they've hedged against that threat.

And having someone provide a more enterprisey K8S is helpful. The version churn right now is pretty bad, and not something F500 companies want to deal with.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#102

Post by tyingq »

cbryan wrote: post #99
edem wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a company (subsidiary of Siemens) who adopted that horrendous Scrum methodology. It was the absolute __worst__ year of my life. I had to pair with people non-stop even when __fixing bugs__. There were zounds of stupid rules which did not make sense whatsoever. Perfect example of forcing a methodology on a company where it will never work. I really like Pivotal products though. RabbitMQ is superb, and alt…

It's not Scrum. It's Extreme Programming. It works fantastically well, even when you're __fixing bugs__. The whole idea is that you need to be paired so that two people can understand and problem solve around the bug. You end up with twice the understanding that you had before. It's worth it.

It works better though, if you start from zero and hire people that drank the Koolaid.

It's hard to shoehorn it into an existing team where some portion of the team doesn't believe the premise. For example, some people (introverts, Asperger's spectrum, etc) will just never be comfortable with pairing.

Pivotal doesn't have this problem because developers that don't believe wouldn't ever apply for a job there.

But, that doesn't help Pivotal in their consulting practice. Very few of their clients would have the same advantage.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#103

Post by amorphid »

cbryan wrote: post #99
edem wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a company (subsidiary of Siemens) who adopted that horrendous Scrum methodology. It was the absolute __worst__ year of my life. I had to pair with people non-stop even when __fixing bugs__. There were zounds of stupid rules which did not make sense whatsoever. Perfect example of forcing a methodology on a company where it will never work. I really like Pivotal products though. RabbitMQ is superb, and alt…

It's not Scrum. It's Extreme Programming. It works fantastically well, even when you're __fixing bugs__. The whole idea is that you need to be paired so that two people can understand and problem solve around the bug. You end up with twice the understanding that you had before. It's worth it.

I dunno. Sometimes it's easier to simply stare at a problem & noodle your way through it. That's hard to do when forced to jibber jabber. Is the ol' stare & noodle a pair-friendly activity?

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#104

Post by sumedh »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
justherefortart wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's most of SF in my experience. Well either that or staffed 90%+ by H1b. Interesting place.

> Well either that or staffed 90%+ by H1b. I didn't believe you for a moment, but wow: http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Pivotal+Software+Inc&job=&c...

I keep reading that US companies complain that they dont get skilled people and I always think its because they are not ready to pay a good salary but looking at the list the salaries look good. So is there really a skills shortage?

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#105

Post by tyingq »

amorphid wrote: post #103
cbryan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Scrum. It's Extreme Programming. It works fantastically well, even when you're __fixing bugs__. The whole idea is that you need to be paired so that two people can understand and problem solve around the bug. You end up with twice the understanding that you had before. It's worth it.

I dunno. Sometimes it's easier to simply stare at a problem & noodle your way through it. That's hard to do when forced to jibber jabber. Is the ol' stare & noodle a pair-friendly activity?

I haven't done pairing myself, but I suspect it's highly variable based on the two specific individuals. Certainly I've noted smart and capable people I work with well, and some that I don't. Not every smart/capable pair is going to mesh. Just because I respect you doesn't mean I can work well with you, especially in such an intimate set up.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#106

Post by nathanaldensr »

A few months ago, I was working a contract at Idaho National Laboratory as a senior DevOps engineer. I recommended they try Cloud Foundry since they were doing a lot of things manually and had a pretty immature CI/CD pipeline; additionally, I was involved in a PCF project at General Motors. INL runs VMware vSphere, which is the platform to run PCF on in-house. I got approval to bring in Pivotal and, through mostly my teammate's and my hard work, we managed to get it running. Props to the helpful sales guy and architect we were assigned. They were available to answer some very detailed questions and did not disappoint with their knowledge and enthusiasm.

PCF is very solid. The only issues we ran into were some confusing configuration settings and your basic federal government bureaucracy nonsense. Once we got all the IaaS boxes ticked, it installed without issue and worked beautifully.

I'd never want to install or maintain open-source Cloud Foundry as it's a nightmare of complexity; however, PCF is a different animal because of its streamlined installer. I definitely recommend giving it a go if you're looking for on-premises PaaS and you've got the IaaS layer to support it. You can also demo PCF within a single VirtualBox VM.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#108

Post by AndrewKemendo »

tpurves wrote: post #10
m0meni wrote: post #6

This is the first I'm hearing of Pivotal. Are they a cloud provider or something? I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what they do from their website.

Their S1 filing actually provides an easy to read description of their business: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918... to paraphrase: Besides consulting and software development (Labs), their main product is PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry). Basically it helps combine the best bits of cloud centric, automated, containerized tools - without locking you in and letting you be portable across AWS, Go…

Thanks for this description. So it seems to me that they are consultants who come in to a non-engineering focused company and kind of "train" their engineers to work in a certain way on their own tools and then run a subscription model on those tools.

Pretty smart way to do it - and I can see how it would be really aggravating from a power-user/10x engineer perspective.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#109

Post by bigiain »

zapita wrote: post #98
bigiain wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tell us there that 319 customers paid $259 million between them in fiscal 2018 - so on average each customer pays $800k/year. They'll have outliers in both directions from that average - But my gut feel is they probably don't have many customers spending less that $80k/year. (Same as I'll bet there's not too many $8mill+/year ones).

Account size and pricing are two different things. The question is: are the $800k customers getting good value for that subscription, or are they looking at projected costs and thinking "we better switch to a competitor before this gets out of hand".

The YoY growth rates suggest they're at least capable of convincing new business that it's good value.

(Though in enterprise sales, even amazingly poor vendors often get to re-bill for several years, until the exec who signed off on the subscription moves on and it becomes politically possible for people internally to admit to each other it was a stupid decision to sign up in the first place... So perhaps 2 years growth here is only telling the "sales capability" side of the story, not the "ongoing value provided" side...)

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#110

Post by chubot »

stickfigure wrote: post #90
chubot wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting... I was watching a bunch of Cloud Foundry talks on YouTube around the 2010-2012 era (my memory is hazy). What happened to it? Why did VMWare abandon it? As far as I remember it was written in Ruby / Event Machine. As I understand it, Heroku also has large parts in Ruby, so that isn't a problem by itself. How did Pivotal get involved? Were they hired by VMWare, and then they took it over? Why / how did th…

Let me see if I can get the cronology right: * EMC bought VMWare * EMC bought Pivotal * EMC moved all the enterprisey software to Pivotal (including CF & Spring) * Dell bought EMC * Dell/EMC spun off Pivotal I arrived shortly after CF moved to Pivotal, so much of this is lore: VMWare had been working on CF for years; they started a 2.0 rewrite which went out of control (with a huge expensive team of primadonnas); EMC…

Wow didn't realize it was so tangled. Considering all that turnover, it's even more of a miracle! Thanks for the recap.

I agree with the philosophy of "grinding it down". Writing quality software is largely about doing the straightforward thing, and not regressing, for years on end... At a certain size, it's too big for any heroics to make a difference, and you have to rely on plain old "engineering" (tests, prioritization, etc.)

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