13 ms·

Pivotal Software S-1

301 points by brendino 9y ago

raywu 9y ago
> 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.
- tschellenbach 9y ago
  How does PCF pricing work and what do those revenue numbers mean in terms of margins?
  - sk1ppy 9y ago
    Their pricing was based on application instances and the list price was ludicrous (several hundred dollars) but most companies got good discounts. 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.
    - zapita 9y ago
      This is still the case. Even after enterprise discounts, the pricing is outrageously high. I know of at least one well-known enterprise customer where IT has mandated a company-wide "get off Pivotal" policy because TCO is just too damn high. I hope for Pivotal's sake that the eye-popping price is not crucial to their growth forecast. If it is, I think 2019-20 will be difficult for them. They just don't have the market share to force these prices down customer's throats.
      - bigiain 9y ago
        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).
        zapita 9y ago
        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".
        bigiain 9y ago
        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...)
        zapita 9y ago
        Right, that's what I've witnessed anecdotally: strong ability to sell, usually as part of a top-down "digital transformation" project with tons of agile development consulting and multi-year sales cycle; then a few years of abysmal results, covered up by the project sponsors, then eventually a purge once the sponsoring exec is replaced.
        bigiain 9y ago
        Heh - exactly. And the other similar version: tightly fought procurement between two opposing vendors with different internal "sponsors". Winning vendor's ability to deliver is stymied at every opportunity by losing sponsor or their internal supporters. Then the few years of abysmal results happens in spite of winning vendors capability and efforts - same outcome plays out.
jedberg 9y ago
Interesting. I wonder if it is coincidence, or if they timed this to ride on the Dropbox IPO.
- brendino 9y ago
  It's related to the Dell - VMWare reverse merger. They have to raise cash to fund the merger.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    That makes sense. I didn't put that together.
- goatherders 9y ago
  Seriously? Dell owns 50% of Pivotal with the rest owned by companies like General Electric and Microsoft. The valuation is $3B. They aren't coattailing anything - it's an actual business with actual customers and actual value.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    I know it's an actual business. I wasn't suggesting it wasn't. But even actual businesses can get a nice boost by filing along with a successful related IPO.
    - what_ever 9y ago
      I don't think the decision could be made that quickly. IPOs are usually in work for months if not years.
      - newfoundglory 9y ago
        Pivotal has been talking about an IPO for years, yes - but the exact announcement timing could perhaps be adjusted in reaction to other events.
exelius 9y ago
Ironically, this ends up being pretty much a spin-off since the companies which founded and own Pivotal are working on a merger themselves. We’re back to this model of “innovation” I guess.
- zxcba23sdf23 9y ago
  Free markets aren't interested in innovation as a norm. It's too disruptive of the capture the entrenched players have. At this point, the economy is really just a "make money off money changing hands". As it evolved to a "service oriented economy" it started servicing it's ephemeral efforts over literal. Cause, IMO, the literal production of goods is a dead end for business. It's being left behind as we've realized how to make enough, and that the same cotton T-shirt is just what it needs to be regardless of a logo. We're rather starting to grasp at straws about what to do outside the rigorous STEM fields.
m0meni 9y ago
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.
- discodave 9y ago
  AFAIK one of the things that they are trying to do with Cloud Foundry is abstract away which cloud you're running on. They are kind-of the OG multi-cloud vendor.
- exelius 9y ago
  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.
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    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 is each provider will specialize in non-overlapping domains. So unless your company will always be running a lowest-common-denominator site, you'll eventually encounter a vendor lock-in feature.
    - exelius 9y ago
      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 Pivotal doesn’t know how enterprise companies develop software. Their scrappy pair-programming Dojos don’t really build systems the way those kinds of companies need to design system requirements. So in my mind, Pivotal’s consulting services are a bunch of startup guys coming in to the enterprise world telling enterprise developers how to build java services. They’re smart and know what they’re doing, but they’re totally out of touch with the kinds of internal controls, reporting metrics and architecture management that larger companies often require.
vbsteven 9y ago
If I’m not mistaken they are also the driving force behind the Spring and Spring Boot frameworks. Probably the biggest Java framework out there.
- wlindner 9y ago
  That is correct https://pivotal.io/spring-app-framework https://pivotal.io/spring-app-framework
stickfigure 9y ago
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 github. CloudFoundry is not sexy software. It's basically Heroku that big stodgy companies can run in-house. Startups will never use it; they can use actual-Heroku. The crazy thing is that Pivotal supports these huge enterprise software installations inside other people's data centers, often without direct access. It's really, really hard work. I really hope this makes a bunch of my friends rich - they deserve it.
- meddlepal 9y ago
  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.
  - taurath 9y ago
    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.
    - cryptonector 9y ago
      Explain?
      - busterarm 9y ago
        Beach-heading, for starters.
    - afeezaziz 9y ago
      Please do explain this. I would love to understand what is the modus operandi.
mephitix 9y ago
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.
- tyingq 9y ago
  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.
  - edem 9y ago
    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 although Spring Boot is really slow and has its problems I use it on projects where performance is not important.
    - cbryan 9y ago
      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.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        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.
bgentry 9y ago
The ownership breakdown is so unusual compared to typical VC-backed startup IPOs. Pivotal has had an interesting run with their history of acquisition and spinoff. Also the Pivotal (cloud infrastructure software) vs Pivotal Labs (consulting) split. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918002061/a2234898zs-1.htm#ea42701_principal_stockholders https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918...
abuckenheimer 9y ago
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-source software programmers, many of whom we do not employ, or our own internal programmers do not continue to use, contribute to and enhance the open-source technologies that we rely on, the market appeal of our offering may be reduced, which could harm our reputation, diminish our brand and result in decreased revenue. We also cannot predict whether further developments and enhancements to these open-source technologies will be available from reliable alternative sources. If the open-source technologies that we rely on become unavailable, we may need to invest in researching and developing alternative technologies.
- volume 9y ago
  I wonder if Red Hat's S-1 said anything similar.
  - nemo44x 9y ago
    Their quarterly reports always have similar wording, to wit: "If open source software programmers, most of whom we do not employ, do not continue to develop and enhance open source technologies, we may be unable to develop new technologies, adequately enhance our existing technologies or meet customer requirements for innovation, quality and price. We rely to a significant degree on a number of largely informal communities of independent open source software programmers to develop and enhance our enterprise technologies. For example, Linus Torvalds, a prominent open source software developer, and a relatively small group of software engineers, many of whom are not employed by us, are primarily responsible for the development and evolution of the Linux kernel, which is the heart of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. If these groups of programmers fail to adequately further develop and enhance open source technologies, we would have to rely on other parties to develop and enhance our offerings or we would need to develop and enhance our offerings with our own resources. We cannot predict whether further developments and enhancements to these technologies would be available from reliable alternative sources. In either event, our development expenses could be increased and our technology release and upgrade schedules could be delayed. Moreover, if third-party software programmers fail to adequately further develop and enhance open source technologies, the development and adoption of these technologies could be stifled and our offerings could become less competitive. Delays in developing, completing or delivering new or enhanced offerings could result in delayed or reduced revenue for those offerings and could also adversely affect customer acceptance of those offerings."
kertis 9y ago
Ok, I was working some time with Cloud Foundry as sysadmin/devops. It's big fucking enterprise piece of software which nobody know exactly how to install it and maintain. Their guide on site is obsolete, it's almost unrealistic to understand in nutshell how it works (compared with Kubernetes/Mesos-Marathon). Only info on Github pages were useful. CF even can't even survive unplanned reboot of DC, after such incidents you literally will get parted cluster and no one know what to do. Thank you Pivotal for such experience.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
theossuary 9y ago
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 deploys containers. But after using the buildpack system for a while, I really think containers are the better solution (assuming you have the CI/CD to keep your custom containers up-to-date with new base images). So it'll be interesting to see what Pivotal does there, and how they position PCF, especially now that they have their own branded version of Kubernetes[1]. [1]. https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal-container-service-pks-the-simple-way-to-bring-kubernetes-to-enterprise-customers https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal...
- Tossrock 9y ago
  They also happen to sponsor the development of Concourse CI, which is a great CI/CD tool.
- tyingq 9y ago
  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.
- Turbots 9y ago
  Kubernetes is container focused. Cloud Foundry is application focused. Those are different abstraction levels for developers, so it depends on what you wanna create. If you just wanna create tons and tons of new applications in a large scale organisation, go for CF. If you need more flexibility and also need to deploy tooling which runs really well on Docker already, go for Kubernetes. Important note: Kubernetes does container orchestration adn automation, and it will restart containers when they crash. It will, however, not restart VMs (Nodes) that crash, making it quite hard to manage yourself. Cloud Foundry has Bosh underneath to automatically keep all the machines (VM or bare metal) running. If you're considering Kubernetes, I would really recommend using a managed service, since managing your own Kubernetes clusters is a PITA. If you're considering both, then Pivotal Cloud Foundry + Pivotal Container Service (PKS) seems very nice. I saw many demos at SpringOne last december and it looks very promising! Also, they're gonna release Pivotal Function Service as well, which is based on Riff, an opensource FaaS made with Kafka and Zookeeper (its mainly being developed by Mark Fisher and other Pivotal employees)
0003 9y ago
This is like proposing to the maid of honor.
sinkholes 9y ago
This series of posts from a former Pivotal employee provides interesting context: https://matt.sh/anatomy-of-a-fraud https://matt.sh/anatomy-of-a-fraud https://matt.sh/commit-this https://matt.sh/commit-this https://matt.sh/dumb-pivotal-2018 https://matt.sh/dumb-pivotal-2018
- zbentley 9y ago
  That person sounds really poorly-adjusted, agenda'd, and borderline-hateful. Not only are many of his claims dubious, unwarranted, or hyperbolic, but there are a few gems like this: > Remember when the CEO globally emailed a picture of his ugly newborn and drugged up post-birth wife to the entire company because he thinks we all submit to his cult of personality? It's not uncommon for that to happen. People share pictures of their new kids to their departments and whole companies all the time. Usually it's because new kids are a joyful experience, for, y'know, humans in general. CEOs do it too--for cynical reasons or not--and raging against that, to say nothing of the criticism of the "drugged-up" mother (epidural anesthesia is incredibly helpful and medically essential in tons of births), displays a somewhat shocking failure to grasp typical corporate-people behavior in America at best, and an axe-to-grind willingness to engage in ad-hominem slander of people's families at worst. Even if any of his claims have merit, I have a ton of trouble believing anything from someone who talks like that.
- jtwaleson 9y ago
  Geez, incredibly negative and even bitter. Sure, the deployment of Cloud Foundry is complex, but we're running 6 (OSS) clusters in production with hardly any problems in the last 2 years. The quality is not nearly as bad as being described here. The author seems angry overall, and especially about sales people making more money, which is simply a necessary evil of selling to enterprises. Full disclosure: I am currently employed by another member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
flerchin 9y ago
I interviewed with Pivotal Labs this week. It went well and they wanted to move forward until I asked for my current compensation. They balked like I was asking for the moon. I coincidentally had an offer from another firm for a 15% raise, so I know I wasn't asking for too much. Pivotal declined when I wouldn't budge, and I took my 15% raise. I start in 3 weeks.
- yesiamyourdad 9y ago
  I had a similar experience a couple years ago. The interview was pretty hard, 6 hours of pair programming in Go, a language that I have only passing familiarity with. The interviewer seemed impressed that I completed the entire task with time to spare. Then it got to talking about salary and that's when things seemed to go sideways. I make top of market for my area, because I've been doing this a long time and I have a history of success so past employers have rewarded me for it. I think the thing is that in consulting, the equation is "margin = billable rate - salary". The higher the salary, the less profitable you are. Feels to me like Pivotal mostly hires mid-level people to hit the sweet spot of experience/skill/salary. It's a bummer because I went on to work with a company that engaged Pivotal Labs and I loved working with the Pivots.
cavisne 9y ago
Does netflix use a lot of pivotal stuff? I always thought of that as a plus as netflix is a pretty strong engineering org.
- delias_ 9y ago
  Spring is probably the only thing. All the rest of the stuff on the tech blog and Netflix OSS is heavily AWS centric, even the container platform Titus. Spring Cloud includes a lot of the Netflix OSS stuff though like Zuul and Archaius.
nathanaldensr 9y ago
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.
nicodjimenez 9y ago
Wow 270 million dollars a year I had no idea they made that much money.
- jyriand 9y ago
  Are you talking about Gross profit? I'm not an accountant, but by the looks of their financial data, Pivotal is consistently losing money. I'm talking about Net loss 163 million.
josephjacks 9y ago
I tweeted an analysis of the S-1: https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/asynchio/status/977255923172352000 https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com...
- austenallred 9y ago
  It wants me to log in to see your tweets?

301 points by brendino 9y ago

> 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.

tschellenbach 9y ago
How does PCF pricing work and what do those revenue numbers mean in terms of margins?
- sk1ppy 9y ago
  Their pricing was based on application instances and the list price was ludicrous (several hundred dollars) but most companies got good discounts. 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.
  - zapita 9y ago
    This is still the case. Even after enterprise discounts, the pricing is outrageously high. I know of at least one well-known enterprise customer where IT has mandated a company-wide "get off Pivotal" policy because TCO is just too damn high. I hope for Pivotal's sake that the eye-popping price is not crucial to their growth forecast. If it is, I think 2019-20 will be difficult for them. They just don't have the market share to force these prices down customer's throats.
    - bigiain 9y ago
      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).
      - zapita 9y ago
        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".
        bigiain 9y ago
        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...)
        zapita 9y ago
        Right, that's what I've witnessed anecdotally: strong ability to sell, usually as part of a top-down "digital transformation" project with tons of agile development consulting and multi-year sales cycle; then a few years of abysmal results, covered up by the project sponsors, then eventually a purge once the sponsoring exec is replaced.
        bigiain 9y ago
        Heh - exactly. And the other similar version: tightly fought procurement between two opposing vendors with different internal "sponsors". Winning vendor's ability to deliver is stymied at every opportunity by losing sponsor or their internal supporters. Then the few years of abysmal results happens in spite of winning vendors capability and efforts - same outcome plays out.

jedberg 9y ago

Interesting. I wonder if it is coincidence, or if they timed this to ride on the Dropbox IPO.

brendino 9y ago
It's related to the Dell - VMWare reverse merger. They have to raise cash to fund the merger.
- jedberg 9y ago
  That makes sense. I didn't put that together.
goatherders 9y ago
Seriously? Dell owns 50% of Pivotal with the rest owned by companies like General Electric and Microsoft. The valuation is $3B. They aren't coattailing anything - it's an actual business with actual customers and actual value.
- jedberg 9y ago
  I know it's an actual business. I wasn't suggesting it wasn't. But even actual businesses can get a nice boost by filing along with a successful related IPO.
  - what_ever 9y ago
    I don't think the decision could be made that quickly. IPOs are usually in work for months if not years.
    - newfoundglory 9y ago
      Pivotal has been talking about an IPO for years, yes - but the exact announcement timing could perhaps be adjusted in reaction to other events.

exelius 9y ago

Ironically, this ends up being pretty much a spin-off since the companies which founded and own Pivotal are working on a merger themselves. We’re back to this model of “innovation” I guess.

zxcba23sdf23 9y ago
Free markets aren't interested in innovation as a norm. It's too disruptive of the capture the entrenched players have. At this point, the economy is really just a "make money off money changing hands". As it evolved to a "service oriented economy" it started servicing it's ephemeral efforts over literal. Cause, IMO, the literal production of goods is a dead end for business. It's being left behind as we've realized how to make enough, and that the same cotton T-shirt is just what it needs to be regardless of a logo. We're rather starting to grasp at straws about what to do outside the rigorous STEM fields.

m0meni 9y ago

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.

discodave 9y ago
AFAIK one of the things that they are trying to do with Cloud Foundry is abstract away which cloud you're running on. They are kind-of the OG multi-cloud vendor.
exelius 9y ago
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.
- mywittyname 9y ago
  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 is each provider will specialize in non-overlapping domains. So unless your company will always be running a lowest-common-denominator site, you'll eventually encounter a vendor lock-in feature.
  - exelius 9y ago
    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 Pivotal doesn’t know how enterprise companies develop software. Their scrappy pair-programming Dojos don’t really build systems the way those kinds of companies need to design system requirements. So in my mind, Pivotal’s consulting services are a bunch of startup guys coming in to the enterprise world telling enterprise developers how to build java services. They’re smart and know what they’re doing, but they’re totally out of touch with the kinds of internal controls, reporting metrics and architecture management that larger companies often require.

vbsteven 9y ago

If I’m not mistaken they are also the driving force behind the Spring and Spring Boot frameworks. Probably the biggest Java framework out there.

wlindner 9y ago
That is correct https://pivotal.io/spring-app-framework https://pivotal.io/spring-app-framework

stickfigure 9y ago

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 github. CloudFoundry is not sexy software. It's basically Heroku that big stodgy companies can run in-house. Startups will never use it; they can use actual-Heroku. The crazy thing is that Pivotal supports these huge enterprise software installations inside other people's data centers, often without direct access. It's really, really hard work. I really hope this makes a bunch of my friends rich - they deserve it.

meddlepal 9y ago
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.
- taurath 9y ago
  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.
  - cryptonector 9y ago
    Explain?
    - busterarm 9y ago
      Beach-heading, for starters.
  - afeezaziz 9y ago
    Please do explain this. I would love to understand what is the modus operandi.

mephitix 9y ago

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.

tyingq 9y ago
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.
- edem 9y ago
  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 although Spring Boot is really slow and has its problems I use it on projects where performance is not important.
  - cbryan 9y ago
    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.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      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.

bgentry 9y ago

The ownership breakdown is so unusual compared to typical VC-backed startup IPOs. Pivotal has had an interesting run with their history of acquisition and spinoff. Also the Pivotal (cloud infrastructure software) vs Pivotal Labs (consulting) split. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918002061/a2234898zs-1.htm#ea42701_principal_stockholders https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918...

abuckenheimer 9y ago

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-source software programmers, many of whom we do not employ, or our own internal programmers do not continue to use, contribute to and enhance the open-source technologies that we rely on, the market appeal of our offering may be reduced, which could harm our reputation, diminish our brand and result in decreased revenue. We also cannot predict whether further developments and enhancements to these open-source technologies will be available from reliable alternative sources. If the open-source technologies that we rely on become unavailable, we may need to invest in researching and developing alternative technologies.

volume 9y ago
I wonder if Red Hat's S-1 said anything similar.
- nemo44x 9y ago
  Their quarterly reports always have similar wording, to wit: "If open source software programmers, most of whom we do not employ, do not continue to develop and enhance open source technologies, we may be unable to develop new technologies, adequately enhance our existing technologies or meet customer requirements for innovation, quality and price. We rely to a significant degree on a number of largely informal communities of independent open source software programmers to develop and enhance our enterprise technologies. For example, Linus Torvalds, a prominent open source software developer, and a relatively small group of software engineers, many of whom are not employed by us, are primarily responsible for the development and evolution of the Linux kernel, which is the heart of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. If these groups of programmers fail to adequately further develop and enhance open source technologies, we would have to rely on other parties to develop and enhance our offerings or we would need to develop and enhance our offerings with our own resources. We cannot predict whether further developments and enhancements to these technologies would be available from reliable alternative sources. In either event, our development expenses could be increased and our technology release and upgrade schedules could be delayed. Moreover, if third-party software programmers fail to adequately further develop and enhance open source technologies, the development and adoption of these technologies could be stifled and our offerings could become less competitive. Delays in developing, completing or delivering new or enhanced offerings could result in delayed or reduced revenue for those offerings and could also adversely affect customer acceptance of those offerings."

kertis 9y ago

Ok, I was working some time with Cloud Foundry as sysadmin/devops. It's big fucking enterprise piece of software which nobody know exactly how to install it and maintain. Their guide on site is obsolete, it's almost unrealistic to understand in nutshell how it works (compared with Kubernetes/Mesos-Marathon). Only info on Github pages were useful. CF even can't even survive unplanned reboot of DC, after such incidents you literally will get parted cluster and no one know what to do. Thank you Pivotal for such experience.

deleted 9y ago

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theossuary 9y ago

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 deploys containers. But after using the buildpack system for a while, I really think containers are the better solution (assuming you have the CI/CD to keep your custom containers up-to-date with new base images). So it'll be interesting to see what Pivotal does there, and how they position PCF, especially now that they have their own branded version of Kubernetes[1]. [1]. https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal-container-service-pks-the-simple-way-to-bring-kubernetes-to-enterprise-customers https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal...

Tossrock 9y ago
They also happen to sponsor the development of Concourse CI, which is a great CI/CD tool.
tyingq 9y ago
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.
Turbots 9y ago
Kubernetes is container focused. Cloud Foundry is application focused. Those are different abstraction levels for developers, so it depends on what you wanna create. If you just wanna create tons and tons of new applications in a large scale organisation, go for CF. If you need more flexibility and also need to deploy tooling which runs really well on Docker already, go for Kubernetes. Important note: Kubernetes does container orchestration adn automation, and it will restart containers when they crash. It will, however, not restart VMs (Nodes) that crash, making it quite hard to manage yourself. Cloud Foundry has Bosh underneath to automatically keep all the machines (VM or bare metal) running. If you're considering Kubernetes, I would really recommend using a managed service, since managing your own Kubernetes clusters is a PITA. If you're considering both, then Pivotal Cloud Foundry + Pivotal Container Service (PKS) seems very nice. I saw many demos at SpringOne last december and it looks very promising! Also, they're gonna release Pivotal Function Service as well, which is based on Riff, an opensource FaaS made with Kafka and Zookeeper (its mainly being developed by Mark Fisher and other Pivotal employees)

0003 9y ago

This is like proposing to the maid of honor.

sinkholes 9y ago

This series of posts from a former Pivotal employee provides interesting context: https://matt.sh/anatomy-of-a-fraud https://matt.sh/anatomy-of-a-fraud https://matt.sh/commit-this https://matt.sh/commit-this https://matt.sh/dumb-pivotal-2018 https://matt.sh/dumb-pivotal-2018

zbentley 9y ago
That person sounds really poorly-adjusted, agenda'd, and borderline-hateful. Not only are many of his claims dubious, unwarranted, or hyperbolic, but there are a few gems like this: > Remember when the CEO globally emailed a picture of his ugly newborn and drugged up post-birth wife to the entire company because he thinks we all submit to his cult of personality? It's not uncommon for that to happen. People share pictures of their new kids to their departments and whole companies all the time. Usually it's because new kids are a joyful experience, for, y'know, humans in general. CEOs do it too--for cynical reasons or not--and raging against that, to say nothing of the criticism of the "drugged-up" mother (epidural anesthesia is incredibly helpful and medically essential in tons of births), displays a somewhat shocking failure to grasp typical corporate-people behavior in America at best, and an axe-to-grind willingness to engage in ad-hominem slander of people's families at worst. Even if any of his claims have merit, I have a ton of trouble believing anything from someone who talks like that.
jtwaleson 9y ago
Geez, incredibly negative and even bitter. Sure, the deployment of Cloud Foundry is complex, but we're running 6 (OSS) clusters in production with hardly any problems in the last 2 years. The quality is not nearly as bad as being described here. The author seems angry overall, and especially about sales people making more money, which is simply a necessary evil of selling to enterprises. Full disclosure: I am currently employed by another member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

flerchin 9y ago

I interviewed with Pivotal Labs this week. It went well and they wanted to move forward until I asked for my current compensation. They balked like I was asking for the moon. I coincidentally had an offer from another firm for a 15% raise, so I know I wasn't asking for too much. Pivotal declined when I wouldn't budge, and I took my 15% raise. I start in 3 weeks.

yesiamyourdad 9y ago
I had a similar experience a couple years ago. The interview was pretty hard, 6 hours of pair programming in Go, a language that I have only passing familiarity with. The interviewer seemed impressed that I completed the entire task with time to spare. Then it got to talking about salary and that's when things seemed to go sideways. I make top of market for my area, because I've been doing this a long time and I have a history of success so past employers have rewarded me for it. I think the thing is that in consulting, the equation is "margin = billable rate - salary". The higher the salary, the less profitable you are. Feels to me like Pivotal mostly hires mid-level people to hit the sweet spot of experience/skill/salary. It's a bummer because I went on to work with a company that engaged Pivotal Labs and I loved working with the Pivots.

cavisne 9y ago

Does netflix use a lot of pivotal stuff? I always thought of that as a plus as netflix is a pretty strong engineering org.

delias_ 9y ago
Spring is probably the only thing. All the rest of the stuff on the tech blog and Netflix OSS is heavily AWS centric, even the container platform Titus. Spring Cloud includes a lot of the Netflix OSS stuff though like Zuul and Archaius.

nathanaldensr 9y ago

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.

nicodjimenez 9y ago

Wow 270 million dollars a year I had no idea they made that much money.

jyriand 9y ago
Are you talking about Gross profit? I'm not an accountant, but by the looks of their financial data, Pivotal is consistently losing money. I'm talking about Net loss 163 million.

josephjacks 9y ago

I tweeted an analysis of the S-1: https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/asynchio/status/977255923172352000 https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com...

austenallred 9y ago
It wants me to log in to see your tweets?