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Pivotal Software S-1

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Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#71

Post by Tossrock »

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…

They also happen to sponsor the development of Concourse CI, which is a great CI/CD tool.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#73

Post by subway »

odonnellryan wrote: post #70
subway wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a commercial venture, absolutely. There will always be folks willing to buy the dream they sell.

You don't think they bring value with the work they do itself? Just hype?

You've gotta keep in mind their product is not the day to day engineering work while you're engaged with Pivotal, but the transformation of your team.

If they're successful, you're left with a team who adheres to or even enjoys the rules and rituals laid down by Pivotal, and you end up with that team I described who can "kinda-sorta mostly get anything done... eventually... with the help of a few external vendors..." From a business perspective, this isn't a terrible place to be.

If they aren't successful, oops, your entire team churned during your engagement with Pivotal, but don't worry -- they're happy to help out with your hiring processes.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#74

Post by SlowBro »

stickfigure wrote: post #20

I consulted at Pivotal on and off over the last several years and got an up-close look at the process. This a heroic feat. In a short matter of years, they took a consulting services company, adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare, and rebuilt it into a product that now serves some of the biggest companies in the world. Pretty much everything has been rewritten and almost all of it is available in githu…

> adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare

I'm late to the game here; was it GSX Server a.k.a. VMware Server?[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Server

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#75

Post by whatshisface »

raverbashing wrote: post #46
gorbachev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This explains some of it: http://www.businessinsider.com/pivotal-906-am-breakfast-meet...

TL;DR "So Pivotal decided to employ both a stick and a carrot. The stick is a mandatory morning meeting at 9 a.m., where your absence will likely be noted. The carrot is the breakfast buffet, "sort of a prize to get in,"" I'm glad I read this. Now I'm sure to never apply for this company

Everyone has different levels of self-control. Maybe in an ideal society the consultants with a great deal of it would work from home/for themselves while the consultants with less would get the breakfast buffet and the gong.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#76

Post by chubot »

stickfigure wrote: post #20

I consulted at Pivotal on and off over the last several years and got an up-close look at the process. This a heroic feat. In a short matter of years, they took a consulting services company, adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare, and rebuilt it into a product that now serves some of the biggest companies in the world. Pretty much everything has been rewritten and almost all of it is available in githu…

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 they rewrite it?

I had some ex co-workers who consulted for Pivotal around 2005-2006, and I have seen their name pop up from time to time. Pivotal tracker seems somewhat popular, and then I remember their name popping up again around Cloud Foundry.

It's nice to see that they turned it into something. It does seem like a nice success story for "open source cloud". This was around the same time that OpenStack was getting going too, but it seems like the success of OpenStack has been more mixed.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#77

Post by rjkennedy98 »

chubot wrote: post #76
stickfigure wrote: post #20

I consulted at Pivotal on and off over the last several years and got an up-close look at the process. This a heroic feat. In a short matter of years, they took a consulting services company, adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare, and rebuilt it into a product that now serves some of the biggest companies in the world. Pretty much everything has been rewritten and almost all of it is available in githu…

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…

Openstack isn't the competitor to CloudFoundary- OpenShift is. Both are sponsored by Red Hat.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#78

Post by einrealist »

exelius wrote: post #28
mywittyname wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't foresee companies continuing to pay for the ability to switch cloud providers. Mostly because I doubt the pricing differences between providers will ever be significant enough to justify moving. I also suspect that providers will not keep feature-competitive with one another. It seems like every month, AWS is releasing new tools, and there's no way that other providers are maintaining this pace. My suspicion…

Well, a lot of what PCF does is help you map the services available in AWS / Azure to an internal service catalog as defined by an enterprise architecture group. This is really powerful in the “small enterprise” space ($1 billion - $5 billion) because that’s often where the EA value proposition becomes strong enough to worry about. This is the level PCF plays at; and the level they’re useful, but in my experience Piv…

I absolutely disagree. Pivotal understands the "needs" of the enterprise world and they prove them wrong at every level. Its that "enterprise world" that needs to change in order to survive or at least to be able to hire new people and to manage the ever growing complexity of enterprise architecture. That's whats referred to as "Digital Transformation".

Its just extremely hard for the old "enterprise world" to adopt to change that is inevitable.

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#79

Post by nsarafa »

abuckenheimer wrote: post #37

We do not control and may be unable to predict the future course of open-source technologies, including those used in our offering, which could reduce the market appeal of our offering and damage our reputation. This is a really cool risk factor that I've never seen before in an S-1, exciting that more big public companies are willing to accept the risk reward that comes with contributing to open source: If open-sour…

I love that Pivotal stands behind the principle of open source. Good for them!

Re: Pivotal Software S-1

#80

Post by brobinson »

mephitix wrote: post #29

The only two experiences I had with Pivotal were with RabbitMQ (a very well designed product) and with Pivotal Tracker - I tried it about a year ago. I felt like I was fighting the software; they were extremely stubborn about adhering to Scrum 'best practices' that may not work in practice.

I got to work with some Pivots at their office about a decade ago and learned to use Tracker from them. It's the only system I've ever seen that works well and gives predictable results over time.

Almost every company I've been at has used abhorrent alternatives like Asana, Jira, etc. and they've been consistently awful experiences.

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