4 ms·

Desperation. Storage vendors are between a rock and a hard place these days because their business has been commoditized. The huge storage deployments of toda

by 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
I could see that from EMC's point of view. But Pivotal would still have to accept their offer and I'm thinking they had no difficulties finding clients and the owners probably had enough money to retire already. EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money. The vision that EMC sold them on is what would give them the assurance that Picotal is not selling just to die there.
- edwinnathaniel 15y ago
  "You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true. You'll never know how easy/hard it is to find clients as a consulting company as big and probably as expensive as Pivotal. Maybe at some point the business model isn't as good as it could have been. Maybe potential clients balked down. Maybe the sales cycle is long enough that the profit has become marginal.
  - drumdance 15y ago
    Consulting is also a real PITA management-wise. You have to map billable hours to available resources, sometimes even unavailable resources you haven't even hired yet. That's really hard to scale.
    - edwinnathaniel 15y ago
      Indeed. Managing human-resources to make every single second profitable is hard. Not to mention the varieties of technology out there: some people use Erlang, Haskell, Node.JS, bunch of NoSQL, Python while Pivotal is more known as the Agile, Ruby, and probably Java to some extend. Also, we don't know what the startup owners/CEOs want; they could come to Pivotal with unreasonable requirement: cloud-scale or money back guarantee?
      - tptacek 15y ago
        It's easy to make every second of the business profitable without making every second of every consultant's day profitable. Most well-run consultancies have target utilization rates way south of 100%.

by moe 15y ago

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

I could see that from EMC's point of view. But Pivotal would still have to accept their offer and I'm thinking they had no difficulties finding clients and the owners probably had enough money to retire already. EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money. The vision that EMC sold them on is what would give them the assurance that Picotal is not selling just to die there.

edwinnathaniel 15y ago
"You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true. You'll never know how easy/hard it is to find clients as a consulting company as big and probably as expensive as Pivotal. Maybe at some point the business model isn't as good as it could have been. Maybe potential clients balked down. Maybe the sales cycle is long enough that the profit has become marginal.
- drumdance 15y ago
  Consulting is also a real PITA management-wise. You have to map billable hours to available resources, sometimes even unavailable resources you haven't even hired yet. That's really hard to scale.
  - edwinnathaniel 15y ago
    Indeed. Managing human-resources to make every single second profitable is hard. Not to mention the varieties of technology out there: some people use Erlang, Haskell, Node.JS, bunch of NoSQL, Python while Pivotal is more known as the Agile, Ruby, and probably Java to some extend. Also, we don't know what the startup owners/CEOs want; they could come to Pivotal with unreasonable requirement: cloud-scale or money back guarantee?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      It's easy to make every second of the business profitable without making every second of every consultant's day profitable. Most well-run consultancies have target utilization rates way south of 100%.