I consulted at Pivotal on and off over the last several years and got an up-close look at the process. This a <i>heroic</i> feat.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I really hope this makes a bunch of my friends rich - they deserve it.
<i>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.</i><p>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:<p><i>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.</i>
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 <i>the</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).<p>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].<p>[1]. <a href="https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal-container-service-pks-the-simple-way-to-bring-kubernetes-to-enterprise-customers" rel="nofollow">https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal...</a>
> 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.
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.
This series of posts from a former Pivotal employee provides interesting context:<p><a href="https://matt.sh/anatomy-of-a-fraud" rel="nofollow">https://matt.sh/anatomy-of-a-fraud</a><p><a href="https://matt.sh/commit-this" rel="nofollow">https://matt.sh/commit-this</a><p><a href="https://matt.sh/dumb-pivotal-2018" rel="nofollow">https://matt.sh/dumb-pivotal-2018</a>
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Thank you Pivotal for such experience.
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.
Ironically, this ends up being pretty much a spin-off since the companies which founded and own Pivotal are working on a merger themselves.<p>We’re back to this model of “innovation” I guess.
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.<p><a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918002061/a2234898zs-1.htm#ea42701_principal_stockholders" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918...</a>
I tweeted an analysis of the S-1:<p><a href="https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/asynchio/status/977255923172352000" rel="nofollow">https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com...</a>