Pivotal Software

Pivotal Software was a prominent American software and services company that specialized in cloud-native platform development and agile software development methodologies. It was formed through a strategic combination of assets from EMC Corporation, VMware, and General Electric, with a focus on enabling large enterprises to build and deploy modern software. The company played a significant role in popularizing Platform as a service and was a major contributor to open-source projects like the Spring Framework and Cloud Foundry. It was acquired by VMware in 2019 and its technologies were subsequently integrated into the broader VMware Tanzu portfolio.

History

The company was officially launched in April 2013, bringing together resources from its corporate parents EMC Corporation and VMware, with additional investment from General Electric. Its formation was spearheaded by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz and Rob Mee, founder of Pivotal Labs, a well-known agile development consultancy. A key early milestone was the spin-out of the Cloud Foundry project as an independent foundation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, in 2014 to foster broader industry collaboration. The company filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018, trading under the ticker symbol "PVTL". In August 2019, VMware announced it would acquire the company for approximately $2.7 billion, a move that was completed by the end of that year, effectively ending its run as an independent public entity.

Products and services

The company's flagship offering was Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a commercial distribution of the open-source Cloud Foundry platform designed to simplify application deployment and lifecycle management on major public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Its portfolio heavily leveraged the Spring Framework, a ubiquitous open-source application framework for Java (programming language) that it stewarded, alongside related projects like Spring Boot. It also offered data solutions such as Greenplum, a massively parallel processing SQL database, and provided professional services and training through Pivotal Labs to promote Agile software development and Test-driven development practices. These tools and methodologies were central to its mission of helping traditional enterprises undergo Digital transformation.

Acquisitions and partnerships

To bolster its technology stack, the company executed several strategic acquisitions, including the purchase of XebiaLabs in 2018 to enhance its DevOps automation capabilities. It also acquired the analytics firm SuSE in a move to strengthen its data science offerings, though this was later divested. A landmark partnership was established with Ford Motor Company in 2016 to form a joint venture, Ford Greenfield Labs, focused on software development for mobility services. The company maintained deep technology alliances with major cloud providers, most notably Google Cloud Platform, with which it collaborated to integrate Kubernetes with its application runtime. Its acquisition by VMware represented the culmination of its partnership history with its former corporate sibling.

Corporate affairs

The company was headquartered in San Francisco, California, with a significant presence and research facilities in other locations such as Denver, Colorado. Its corporate culture was heavily influenced by the agile and Pair programming practices pioneered by Pivotal Labs. Following its acquisition by VMware, its products and personnel were integrated into the VMware Tanzu business unit, which became VMware's central offering for modern applications. Key intellectual property, including the Spring Framework, continues to be actively developed under the stewardship of VMware and the broader open-source community.

See also

* Cloud Foundry * VMware Tanzu * Spring Framework * Platform as a service * Digital transformation

Category:Cloud computing providers Category:Software companies of the United States Category:Companies based in San Francisco