5 ms·

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

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
    That's not been my experience, but the D3 work I've ran in Chrome has been on the small side.
philaquilina 15y ago
I was very surprised by this too. It sounds like EMC is trying to establish some kind of legitimacy in the startup world. I feel like Pivotal gets a lot of respect from the hacker community. I wonder what kind of fallout this will have there.
gojomo 15y ago
My thought was also: "Would. Not. Have. Guessed. That." But, in light of (EMC subsidiary) VMWare's acquisitions, it makes a bit more sense. They've been beefing up on all sorts of software-development teams and tools. They own SpringSource, and picked up a bunch of other companies last year: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/12/a-year-of-vmware-acquisitions.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/12/a-year-of-vmware-a...
moe 15y ago
Desperation. Storage vendors are between a rock and a hard place these days because their business has been commoditized. The huge storage deployments of today are not running on EMC or NetApp anymore. They are running on arrays of beige boxes, for good reasons[1]. At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace. And they don't really know where to go from here. (the CDN market is a another example for this phenomena btw; Hi Akamai! How many auxiliary products have you invented today?) [1] http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of-a-petabyte-chart.jpg http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of...
- codenerdz 15y ago
  "...At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace. And they don't really know where to go from here..." They do own the company that owns the majority of enterprise cloud market...
  - moe 15y ago
    ...which is being commoditized as well. Don't get me wrong, I don't think EMC is going anywhere soon. But their days of fat margins by the virtue of vendor-lockin are numbered. They're obviously trying to get moving with acquisitions like this. But one can only wonder how on earth pivotal (~100 employees) is supposed to beat 30years of BigCo inertia out of ~50k employees - if that's the idea behind this. Are they trying to rebuild Rome with lego bricks?
    - tbsdy 15y ago
      Since the turn of the century, EMC have purchased something like 80 companies. Almost all of them outside of storage related companies have had issues, or have been dropped. If you are in a company that gets bought by EMC, my suggestion is to start looking for another company to work for!
- Timothee 15y ago
rmoriz 15y ago
Maybe EMC is planning to reintegrate VMware. VMware already bought a lot of tech companies in the cloud and development space. To go into a competition with a subsidiary firm does not make any sense.

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
  That's not been my experience, but the D3 work I've ran in Chrome has been on the small side.

philaquilina 15y ago

I was very surprised by this too. It sounds like EMC is trying to establish some kind of legitimacy in the startup world. I feel like Pivotal gets a lot of respect from the hacker community. I wonder what kind of fallout this will have there.

gojomo 15y ago

My thought was also: "Would. Not. Have. Guessed. That." But, in light of (EMC subsidiary) VMWare's acquisitions, it makes a bit more sense. They've been beefing up on all sorts of software-development teams and tools. They own SpringSource, and picked up a bunch of other companies last year: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/12/a-year-of-vmware-acquisitions.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/12/a-year-of-vmware-a...

moe 15y ago

Desperation. Storage vendors are between a rock and a hard place these days because their business has been commoditized. The huge storage deployments of today are not running on EMC or NetApp anymore. They are running on arrays of beige boxes, for good reasons[1]. At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace. And they don't really know where to go from here. (the CDN market is a another example for this phenomena btw; Hi Akamai! How many auxiliary products have you invented today?) [1] http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of-a-petabyte-chart.jpg http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/cost-of...

codenerdz 15y ago
"...At the same time the low-end of the market is moving to the cloud, also for good reasons. Their customer-base is shrinking from both ends at a rapid pace. And they don't really know where to go from here..." They do own the company that owns the majority of enterprise cloud market...
- moe 15y ago
  ...which is being commoditized as well. Don't get me wrong, I don't think EMC is going anywhere soon. But their days of fat margins by the virtue of vendor-lockin are numbered. They're obviously trying to get moving with acquisitions like this. But one can only wonder how on earth pivotal (~100 employees) is supposed to beat 30years of BigCo inertia out of ~50k employees - if that's the idea behind this. Are they trying to rebuild Rome with lego bricks?
  - tbsdy 15y ago
    Since the turn of the century, EMC have purchased something like 80 companies. Almost all of them outside of storage related companies have had issues, or have been dropped. If you are in a company that gets bought by EMC, my suggestion is to start looking for another company to work for!
Timothee 15y ago

rmoriz 15y ago

Maybe EMC is planning to reintegrate VMware. VMware already bought a lot of tech companies in the cloud and development space. To go into a competition with a subsidiary firm does not make any sense.