5 ms·

EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

200 points by michaelfairley 15y ago

derwiki 15y ago
Wonder what this will do for existing engagements.
sshconnection 15y ago
Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?
- Timothee 15y ago
  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.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    Only people who run their business on a random startup webapp. I wish amazon or Google would externalities their pro quality trackers, though.
    - AndyKelley 15y ago
      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.
      - rsanheim 15y ago
        There is no such thing as a 'pro quality' tracker. They ALL suck, in different ways, and simply try to minimize their deficiencies based on the context they were developed in. You find the one that fits your world view and your work flow, and put up with the annoyances and oddities, or try to paper over them with hacks and service hooks.
      - Drbble 15y ago
        Amazon had tools, but not every team used them. I loved the tool Haakon wrote. And there was actually a great third party open source tool back in 2009, whose name I forget, that was bizarre abandoned. It's not like Pivotal sets a high bar. It doesn't even have a notion of progress, and it has that ridiculous multi column layout so you can't easily use a screen to look at a task. And it runs on a random startup webserver that can be turned off at any moment.
  - jes5199 15y ago
    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
    - apinstein 15y ago
      We switched from tracker to Planbox about 6 months ago and have been thrilled. Same general model as tracker with better execution. It's a young product so there are still some issues but it's clearly heading in the right direction. They also have an import from tracker so it's painless to try out.
      - orblivion 15y ago
        I'm annoyed by Pivotal's interface too, but the intro video from Planbox didn't really impress me much (maybe because I work at a really small company and that level of hierarchy and customization probably isn't relevant to us.) Do you have any particular examples of what it does better than Pivotal?
        apinstein 15y ago
        I came to loathe the columnar setup of Pivotal. I found myself constantly rearranging the interface just to be able to work. We have a lot of project and subprojects here, and Planbox's hierarchy (there is basically one more level than in Tracker) is really useful. Their UX for slicing and dicing based on person, label, project, etc is also nice. The search is faster (it's all client side so it's practically instant). The charts make more sense to me. It doesn't treat stories as a unit of work; rather they are a goal. Thus all of the tasks in Planbox can be individually assigned to different people and estimated and time-tracked at that same level of granularity. Overall I just found that there were a lot of things I was hacking around in Pivotal, and frankly I didn't even notice it. It's only when we hired a couple of people and they pointed out frustrations with Pivotal that I started looking around. When I started using Planbox, that's when I really realized how much I was adjusting myself to the limitations of Pivotal. I find myself much less stressed managing things via Planbox. Hope that helps!
- philodespotos 15y ago
  The CEO posted something on their blog: http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-pivotal-increased-velocity http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv... > Same services, same Pivotal Tracker, same industry leading development practices - now paired with more resources than ever.
- snprbob86 15y ago
  Switch to Trello. It's practically the same thing, but far less opinionated/religious.
  - orblivion 15y ago
    Trello is great, the interface makes me a lot happier than Pivotal, but I think it's more suited for something like a big data collection and processing project, where you have a lot of little pieces to keep track of. It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development. Correct me if I'm wrong though, please. BTW I thought I read someone comment somewhere about being able to split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that? That's one thing that I thought would make Pivotal much better.
    - snprbob86 15y ago
      > It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development. See how the Trello team uses it: https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa1136000000c https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa113... > split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that? Yes. There is a "covert to card" link that appears when you click on a checklist item.
  - vineet 15y ago
    One of the nice things about Pivotal Tracker was that it was opinionated in just the right ways. That being said, I like Trello as well. I will not be surprised if Trello provides an imported for Pivotal Tracker because of the uncertainty of this news.
Timothee 15y ago
My first reaction was to say "wtf" out loud. It's just that EMC and Pivotal Labs to me represents kind of opposites in the spectrum: EMC is the established old-school hardware company, while Pivotal Labs is the cool software consultancy that the cool startups hire for web-apps. So that pairing feels odd. I'm curious to know what is the goal behind that… "Bringing agile methodologies to the enterprise" doesn't make much sense: would EMC be interested in making consulting money for agile training? That doesn't seem to be at the same scale of the rest of the business… And "hardware as a service" sound like it would be more suited for veterans from the cloud providers they might want to compete with. Surprising to say the least.
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  IBM went through a transition from machines to services, it wouldn't surprise me if EMC were trying to get into services this way.
  - lnguyen 15y ago
    They've already been in services ala IBM for a number of years.
- euroclydon 15y ago
  I've never heard of Pivotal Labs but perhaps they're competent in big data backed web apps. I work in the data center monitoring space (actually power systems simulations) and I've created a SVG based web app for power system simulation and monitoring visualization, and it's garnered interest from big traditional players in this space.
  - wslh 15y ago
    offtopic: is SVG buggy in Google Chrome? I found a lot of bugs (crashes) playing with big graphs in d3.
    - euroclydon 15y ago
mhartl 15y ago
This is a head-scratcher for me, but I know a bunch of current and former Pivotal Labs peeps (including CEO Rob Mee), and they're some of the smartest, savviest hackers around. I'm confident that this will end up making sense and will prove to be a good move for both parties. (I practically live inside Pivotal Tracker, so I certainly hope so.)
mikecarlton 15y ago
Great, another useful service for them to destroy. Mozy was very good, but went downhill after being bought by EMC.
overworkedasian 15y ago
EMC could have just hired them as consultants to teach them the ways of being 'more agile' with their product set. hard to find a business reason behind this other than buying them for their non tangible 'processes".
- crusso 15y ago
  What would have been in it for the Pivotal guys to do consulting to EMC? EMC wanted a solid team of next-gen developers. My impression was that Pivotal was doing fairly well so probably insisted on a good price for their company.
  - overworkedasian 15y ago
    Not sure man. You could be right. They could be building the foundation to build next gen apps that better mesh all the product in the EMC product portfolio. Only time will tell.
qq66 15y ago
Pivotal Labs doesn't really have assets beyond its people, so unless this is a very large deal with strong golden handcuffs, I see it being a losing proposition as all the Pivotal guys go to Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/startups.
tlogan 15y ago
Does anybody know what will happen with Pivotal Tracker? Will it be shut down?
- schammy 15y ago
  Christ I hope not. I love that tool.
2pasc 15y ago
Weird. Although I have heard that Pivotal Tracker is making very significant revenues (in the tens of millions)...this is not much for a Billion dollar Company like EMC!
MitziMoto 15y ago
As an EMC Employee, I just hope they let us use Pivotal Tracker!
xoebus 15y ago
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-pivotal-increased-velocity http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...
- benackles 15y ago
  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 http://37signals.com/exit
  - milkshakes 15y ago
    case in point: LiveJournal / Six Apart http://news.livejournal.com/82926.html http://news.livejournal.com/82926.html
  - jackowayed 15y ago
    There are notable exceptions. Heroku is still shipping awesome new stuff at a rapid clip under their Salesforce overlords. I don't know directly, but the plan at acquisition time was that they would stay pretty independent. I would guess that that helps a lot. I think Pivotal could be one of those. Him saying "same services" suggests that EMC isn't planning on absorbing the team into something else. It helps that Pivotal is (presumably) very profitable, so there's value to leaving it alone instead of just viewing it as a source of a ton of great devs. If it's still really Pivotal, and it just happens to be owned by EMC, they might fade much slower than the "everyone leaves within a year and a half" that we've seen so many times.
    - hboon 15y ago
      There are notable exceptions, but in every case of acquisition in the enterprise software space, the PR after the acquisition will always say things will remain the same, it will remain a standalone subsidiary. But thing usually change, quickly, within a year or two.
tbsdy 15y ago
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!
- wpietri 15y ago
  I am weirdly excited that there is exactly one Google hit for the word "hrirachu".
  - tbsdy 15y ago
    Yeah, I saw that... I wrote this from my iPad and didn't notice the typo till way too late :-) I suspect my comment will for ever more rank highly in Google search results for "hrirachu".
- jcoder 15y ago
  Off-topic, but I was curious what "hrirachu" meant in english, and now I'm just incredibly impressed by DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hrirachu https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hrirachu http://www.google.com/search?q=hrirachu http://www.google.com/search?q=hrirachu
nivertech 15y ago
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? ;)
- geoffschmidt 15y ago
  Sure, but EMC and Mozy are a natural fit. It's not like he heard a really good song on the radio, and the next day EMC bought the record label.
  - nivertech 15y ago
    You never know. The scenario you described not much different from ebay buying Skype.
  - the_paul 15y ago
    They sound like they should be, right? Mozy did storage, EMC did storage? But as a Mozy employee during the time of the acquisition, I'd like to state for the record how emphatically and fantastically wrong this is. There is more of a "natural fit" between Sesame Street and Godzilla's wang than there was between Mozy and EMC. :)
milkshakes 15y ago
Sounds like a new vacuum is about to open in a highly demanded space.
- johnx123-up 15y ago
  I'm sure Asian companies have already ventured into it http://fundprojectswith.me/ http://fundprojectswith.me/
dabit 15y ago
Perhaps Pivotal wins by being able to get a ton of enterprise engineers from EMC, turn them into Rubyists and scale their already very successful model. If they are profitable at ~100 employees, they would be even more profitable at ~150, ~200.
cmalpeli 15y ago
EMC also has a consulting division - so perhaps plans to integrate it there? http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm
ajays 15y ago
EMC seems to be slowly building up an "enterprise software" portfolio. They bought Zimbra from Yahoo, which includes "Zimbra Collaboration Suite", a groupware. Now they've acquired Pivotal, which makes (among other things) Pivotal Tracker. I think I see a pattern here.

200 points by michaelfairley 15y ago

derwiki 15y ago

Wonder what this will do for existing engagements.

sshconnection 15y ago

Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?

Timothee 15y ago
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.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Only people who run their business on a random startup webapp. I wish amazon or Google would externalities their pro quality trackers, though.
  - AndyKelley 15y ago
    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.
    - rsanheim 15y ago
      There is no such thing as a 'pro quality' tracker. They ALL suck, in different ways, and simply try to minimize their deficiencies based on the context they were developed in. You find the one that fits your world view and your work flow, and put up with the annoyances and oddities, or try to paper over them with hacks and service hooks.
    - Drbble 15y ago
      Amazon had tools, but not every team used them. I loved the tool Haakon wrote. And there was actually a great third party open source tool back in 2009, whose name I forget, that was bizarre abandoned. It's not like Pivotal sets a high bar. It doesn't even have a notion of progress, and it has that ridiculous multi column layout so you can't easily use a screen to look at a task. And it runs on a random startup webserver that can be turned off at any moment.
- jes5199 15y ago
  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
  - apinstein 15y ago
    We switched from tracker to Planbox about 6 months ago and have been thrilled. Same general model as tracker with better execution. It's a young product so there are still some issues but it's clearly heading in the right direction. They also have an import from tracker so it's painless to try out.
    - orblivion 15y ago
      I'm annoyed by Pivotal's interface too, but the intro video from Planbox didn't really impress me much (maybe because I work at a really small company and that level of hierarchy and customization probably isn't relevant to us.) Do you have any particular examples of what it does better than Pivotal?
      - apinstein 15y ago
        I came to loathe the columnar setup of Pivotal. I found myself constantly rearranging the interface just to be able to work. We have a lot of project and subprojects here, and Planbox's hierarchy (there is basically one more level than in Tracker) is really useful. Their UX for slicing and dicing based on person, label, project, etc is also nice. The search is faster (it's all client side so it's practically instant). The charts make more sense to me. It doesn't treat stories as a unit of work; rather they are a goal. Thus all of the tasks in Planbox can be individually assigned to different people and estimated and time-tracked at that same level of granularity. Overall I just found that there were a lot of things I was hacking around in Pivotal, and frankly I didn't even notice it. It's only when we hired a couple of people and they pointed out frustrations with Pivotal that I started looking around. When I started using Planbox, that's when I really realized how much I was adjusting myself to the limitations of Pivotal. I find myself much less stressed managing things via Planbox. Hope that helps!
philodespotos 15y ago
The CEO posted something on their blog: http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-pivotal-increased-velocity http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv... > Same services, same Pivotal Tracker, same industry leading development practices - now paired with more resources than ever.
snprbob86 15y ago
Switch to Trello. It's practically the same thing, but far less opinionated/religious.
- orblivion 15y ago
  Trello is great, the interface makes me a lot happier than Pivotal, but I think it's more suited for something like a big data collection and processing project, where you have a lot of little pieces to keep track of. It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development. Correct me if I'm wrong though, please. BTW I thought I read someone comment somewhere about being able to split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that? That's one thing that I thought would make Pivotal much better.
  - snprbob86 15y ago
    > It doesn't seem like it would be that great for software development. See how the Trello team uses it: https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa1136000000c https://trello.com/board/trello-development/4d5ea62fd76aa113... > split checkboxes out into separate cards, but I couldn't find any other mention of it. Can you do that? Yes. There is a "covert to card" link that appears when you click on a checklist item.
- vineet 15y ago
  One of the nice things about Pivotal Tracker was that it was opinionated in just the right ways. That being said, I like Trello as well. I will not be surprised if Trello provides an imported for Pivotal Tracker because of the uncertainty of this news.

Timothee 15y ago

My first reaction was to say "wtf" out loud. It's just that EMC and Pivotal Labs to me represents kind of opposites in the spectrum: EMC is the established old-school hardware company, while Pivotal Labs is the cool software consultancy that the cool startups hire for web-apps. So that pairing feels odd. I'm curious to know what is the goal behind that… "Bringing agile methodologies to the enterprise" doesn't make much sense: would EMC be interested in making consulting money for agile training? That doesn't seem to be at the same scale of the rest of the business… And "hardware as a service" sound like it would be more suited for veterans from the cloud providers they might want to compete with. Surprising to say the least.

aaronblohowiak 15y ago
IBM went through a transition from machines to services, it wouldn't surprise me if EMC were trying to get into services this way.
- lnguyen 15y ago
  They've already been in services ala IBM for a number of years.
euroclydon 15y ago
I've never heard of Pivotal Labs but perhaps they're competent in big data backed web apps. I work in the data center monitoring space (actually power systems simulations) and I've created a SVG based web app for power system simulation and monitoring visualization, and it's garnered interest from big traditional players in this space.
- wslh 15y ago
  offtopic: is SVG buggy in Google Chrome? I found a lot of bugs (crashes) playing with big graphs in d3.
  - euroclydon 15y ago

mhartl 15y ago

This is a head-scratcher for me, but I know a bunch of current and former Pivotal Labs peeps (including CEO Rob Mee), and they're some of the smartest, savviest hackers around. I'm confident that this will end up making sense and will prove to be a good move for both parties. (I practically live inside Pivotal Tracker, so I certainly hope so.)

mikecarlton 15y ago

Great, another useful service for them to destroy. Mozy was very good, but went downhill after being bought by EMC.

overworkedasian 15y ago

EMC could have just hired them as consultants to teach them the ways of being 'more agile' with their product set. hard to find a business reason behind this other than buying them for their non tangible 'processes".

crusso 15y ago
What would have been in it for the Pivotal guys to do consulting to EMC? EMC wanted a solid team of next-gen developers. My impression was that Pivotal was doing fairly well so probably insisted on a good price for their company.
- overworkedasian 15y ago
  Not sure man. You could be right. They could be building the foundation to build next gen apps that better mesh all the product in the EMC product portfolio. Only time will tell.

qq66 15y ago

Pivotal Labs doesn't really have assets beyond its people, so unless this is a very large deal with strong golden handcuffs, I see it being a losing proposition as all the Pivotal guys go to Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/startups.

tlogan 15y ago

Does anybody know what will happen with Pivotal Tracker? Will it be shut down?

schammy 15y ago
Christ I hope not. I love that tool.

2pasc 15y ago

Weird. Although I have heard that Pivotal Tracker is making very significant revenues (in the tens of millions)...this is not much for a Billion dollar Company like EMC!

MitziMoto 15y ago

As an EMC Employee, I just hope they let us use Pivotal Tracker!

xoebus 15y ago

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-pivotal-increased-velocity http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...

benackles 15y ago
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 http://37signals.com/exit
- milkshakes 15y ago
  case in point: LiveJournal / Six Apart http://news.livejournal.com/82926.html http://news.livejournal.com/82926.html
- jackowayed 15y ago
  There are notable exceptions. Heroku is still shipping awesome new stuff at a rapid clip under their Salesforce overlords. I don't know directly, but the plan at acquisition time was that they would stay pretty independent. I would guess that that helps a lot. I think Pivotal could be one of those. Him saying "same services" suggests that EMC isn't planning on absorbing the team into something else. It helps that Pivotal is (presumably) very profitable, so there's value to leaving it alone instead of just viewing it as a source of a ton of great devs. If it's still really Pivotal, and it just happens to be owned by EMC, they might fade much slower than the "everyone leaves within a year and a half" that we've seen so many times.
  - hboon 15y ago
    There are notable exceptions, but in every case of acquisition in the enterprise software space, the PR after the acquisition will always say things will remain the same, it will remain a standalone subsidiary. But thing usually change, quickly, within a year or two.

tbsdy 15y ago

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!

wpietri 15y ago
I am weirdly excited that there is exactly one Google hit for the word "hrirachu".
- tbsdy 15y ago
  Yeah, I saw that... I wrote this from my iPad and didn't notice the typo till way too late :-) I suspect my comment will for ever more rank highly in Google search results for "hrirachu".
jcoder 15y ago
Off-topic, but I was curious what "hrirachu" meant in english, and now I'm just incredibly impressed by DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hrirachu https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hrirachu http://www.google.com/search?q=hrirachu http://www.google.com/search?q=hrirachu

nivertech 15y ago

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? ;)

geoffschmidt 15y ago
Sure, but EMC and Mozy are a natural fit. It's not like he heard a really good song on the radio, and the next day EMC bought the record label.
- nivertech 15y ago
  You never know. The scenario you described not much different from ebay buying Skype.
- the_paul 15y ago
  They sound like they should be, right? Mozy did storage, EMC did storage? But as a Mozy employee during the time of the acquisition, I'd like to state for the record how emphatically and fantastically wrong this is. There is more of a "natural fit" between Sesame Street and Godzilla's wang than there was between Mozy and EMC. :)

milkshakes 15y ago

Sounds like a new vacuum is about to open in a highly demanded space.

johnx123-up 15y ago
I'm sure Asian companies have already ventured into it http://fundprojectswith.me/ http://fundprojectswith.me/

dabit 15y ago

Perhaps Pivotal wins by being able to get a ton of enterprise engineers from EMC, turn them into Rubyists and scale their already very successful model. If they are profitable at ~100 employees, they would be even more profitable at ~150, ~200.

cmalpeli 15y ago

EMC also has a consulting division - so perhaps plans to integrate it there? http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm

ajays 15y ago

EMC seems to be slowly building up an "enterprise software" portfolio. They bought Zimbra from Yahoo, which includes "Zimbra Collaboration Suite", a groupware. Now they've acquired Pivotal, which makes (among other things) Pivotal Tracker. I think I see a pattern here.