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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

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%.
- Timothee 15y ago
  "You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true. Absolutely! I wanted to add a disclaimer that I have no idea how it really goes on the inside, but my bus stop was coming up. :) My comment in this thread are all from the perception I have of EMC and Pivotal Labs.
rjurney 15y ago
Or it was a shocking amount of money that made a lot of people rich. Its one thing for the few top guys to make money. If EMC minted lots of millionaires, thats another.
random42 15y ago
> EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money. Never underestimate the power of huge pile of money. Even for the filthy rich.

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%.
Timothee 15y ago
"You'll only know if you're inside the company" rings true. Absolutely! I wanted to add a disclaimer that I have no idea how it really goes on the inside, but my bus stop was coming up. :) My comment in this thread are all from the perception I have of EMC and Pivotal Labs.

rjurney 15y ago

Or it was a shocking amount of money that made a lot of people rich. Its one thing for the few top guys to make money. If EMC minted lots of millionaires, thats another.

random42 15y ago

> EMC must have sold them on something more than just a huge pile of money. Never underestimate the power of huge pile of money. Even for the filthy rich.