81–90 of 148 posts
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I know some folks at Pivotal as well. Congrats to them! I'm a bit depressed looking through some of the comments on here. It feels like people don't understand or care what Pivotal has done and is doing and are writing it off because of the tech rather than the idea and implementation.
The optics that they use to get consulting contracts with non-tech big-co's are the exact opposite that you'd want to cultivate to impress HN.
> We are focused on subscription sales of our platform. Since announcing PCF in November 2013, our subscription customer count has grown rapidly to 319 as of the end of fiscal 2018. Our subscription revenue was $95.0 million, $150.0 million and $259.0 million for fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 58% and 73% for our two most recent fiscal years.
How does PCF pricing work and what do those revenue numbers mean in terms of margins?
The thing that bothered me with the model was it disincentives modern microservice architectures. One big monolith cost less than lots of smaller components.
It may have changed since I last saw the details.
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They basically make a Java-based application abstraction layer that sits on top of AWS, Azure, VMWare, etc. Basically a platform for managing storage and compute across multiple on-prem and cloud providers. It’s real enterprisey stuff — as in, it’s probably not even interesting to you until you’re big enough to run in a half dozen data centers and within all the cloud providers.
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…
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They are a super trendy development and cloud consultancy firm based in San Francisco and New York. They have all the right words and everything. Pretentious start time of 9:06 am, signalled by a gong. All pair programming on iMacs. I visited their very shiny office for a tech talk. Two employees (they call themselves Pivots) used the exact same language to describe how good the strict schedule is. I struck up a conv…
My experience also was that they have a huge snob factor there. I was doing consulting for a database company when I visited their office. In the meeting I was announced as someone when knew our company's product, to which one of the people responded "Oh, I think we already know how works". I wanted to respond, you guys have no f-ing clue how it works, but couldn't for decorum reasons.
I'm sorry you had such a disheartening experience at Pivotal; it's uncommon — in general, Pivotal people tend to be very warm and kind, and not snobby at all.
When I joined Pivotal six (seven?) years ago, I assumed that I'd stay maybe two years, tops, but the people were nice, and that's what has kept me here.
Also, the comment you heard ("Oh I think we already know how [Database X] works") may have not intended to be snobby but rather a nod to one of the developers there: if the database company was InfluxDB, and the office you visited was the NYC office, then there's a good chance that they were referring to one of the Pivotal developers, John, who was one of the early developers of InfluxDB along with Paul Dix and Todd Persen. [1]
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[1] https://www.influxdata.com/blog/influxdb-1-0-ga-released-a-r...
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.
Their consulting practice is similar. They won't sign on unless your people adopt their methodology 100% (pairing, etc) Guess it's nice to be able to be that choosy about clients.
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 although Spring Boot is really slow and has its problems I use it on projects where performance is not important.
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
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…
Pivotal Labs got bought by EMC in 2012, who also owned VMWare. A year or so later EMC spun out Pivotal Labs combined with VMWare and some other companies(Green Plum) in a new company under the Pivotal name.
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.
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…
* 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
When I say "pretty much everything has been rewritten" I mean it has evolved like that; they didn't sit down to rewrite CloudFoundry (Pivotal does not do rewrites as a cultural axiom). I mean that piecemeal pretty much every bit of code has been altered in significant ways. A lot of the Ruby has been swapped out for Go for performance and maintainability reasons. It was pretty funny to watch a large body of die-hard Rubyists get excited about static types (come to the light!).
As a consultant I was really a fringe player; I'm sure there are people reading this who are/were much more involved and could tell the story better.
The thing I found most interesting is that this project should have failed. A HUGE incredibly complicated body of enterprise software with near-100% team turnover? I would have bet against it ever working. But all that pair programming and rotation and writing stories and backfilling tests etc just eventually ground the problem down. It was expensive as hell and it took years but it looks like a success story now. I don't know of any other big takeover project like this that worked. It's a huge credit to the people working on it, and yes - to the "Pivotal process" that seems to irk so many people in this thread.