A quick look at Pivotal.io
The recently IPOed company aims to ease the way businesses develop and launch their software in order to increase productivty while decreasing the cost and risk of deploying new software
Pivotal was spun off from Dell, EMC and VMware in 2013. Soon after, General Electric made a major investment in the company and this was followed by major investments from Ford and Microsoft in 2013. By 2017, Pivotal boasted that 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies were their customers. In 2018, the company went public and was valued at around $4 billions.

Before diving into their activities, one should know that Dell retains over 70% of Pivotal’s shares and 96% of its voting rights. However, Pivotal’s CEO, Rob Mee, states that Dell is a big support for the firm and that Pivotal truly operates as an indendent entity.
Pivotal’s activities
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the main product sold by the company. It is a basically a cloud software that help companies build and use cloud softwares. The four main services they render to their clients are:
- Modern software design
- App modernization
- Scalability
- Analytics
The main advantage of their product is twofold. On one hand, Pivotal claim that their products and services are super secure as their Pivotal Cloud Foundry encrypts data and you can secure your credentials with CredHub which is a central point of control fro credential generation.
On the other hand, Pivotal’s product insure a high level of availability for your apps and softwares. Through built-in redundancies and a high level of resiliency across the different layers of the stack, Pivotal’s softwares guarantee a highly available (minimal downtime) deployment across clouds.
As demand for such flexbile and highly deployable interfaces might only be growing in the future, we expect the demand for Pivotal’s product to increase. As of today, they have over 335 “subscription customers” (customers who are billed at least $50.000 a year through subscription plans). It also seems that their customers are willing to buy more of Pivotal’s products as their dollar-based net epansion rate grow at an average rate of around 150% every three months.
One also has to know that a large share of Pivotal’s revenue come from Pivotal Labs. Which offer IT consulting-like services for firms who want to transit to a new IT model in-house. You can see for yourself how Pivotal is doing financially:

Main take aways
Pivotal is an interesting business and certainly serves a useful purpose in the current market. However, the lack of news coverage, clarity about their activities and the potential rise of giants such as IBM and Google who may enter the sector rapidly, sheds a dim light on their business outlook.
We will thus wait another quarter before potentially coming back to review this company more deeply.
