EMC Buys Pivotal Labs

My first reaction was to say "wtf" out loud.<p>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…<p>"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…<p>And "hardware as a service" sound like it would be more suited for veterans from the cloud providers they might want to compete with.<p>Surprising to say the least.

Pivotal Labs CEO Rob Mee just posted a short message on his company blog about the acquisition :<p><a href="http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-pivotal-increased-velocity" rel="nofollow">http://pivotallabs.com/users/rob/blog/articles/2052-same-piv...</a>

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.)

Any word on the future of Pivotal Tracker?

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.

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

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.

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

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".

Wonder what this will do for existing engagements.

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.

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

EMC also has a consulting division - so perhaps plans to integrate it there? <a href="http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.emc.com/services/emc-consulting.htm</a>

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

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!

This reminded me Mozy story.<p>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.<p>Maybe this time he found Pivotal Tracker? ;)

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!