EMC Corp., the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage and cloud hardware company has bought Pivotal Labs, a San Francisco-based consulting firms well known for its tool Pivotal Tracker and also for its pioneering work on agile development methodology. I have confirmed the news after talking to sources familiar with the company. I had first reported earlier this week.
The San Francisco-based Pivotal has been involved with many web and mobile startups, including Twitter. The company’s agile development chops made it a favorite hunting ground for other companies such as Square. It is not clear to me why EMC acquired Pivotal, though a reasonable guess would be to take agile development and Pivotal methodology into the enterprise.
Changing Landscape
It would a different — and a smart — kind of services division for a company like EMC. As I have said before, large hardware vendors are facing a unique and new challenge from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who are getting the attention of next generation of businesses. In order for these hardware vendors to stay relevant, they need to offer their hardware as a service – storage or computing for example – and then attract others such as startups and enterprises to their platforms.
PS: EMC Greenplum’s Scott Yara would be speaking with me at our Structure Data conference in New York on March 21st & March 22nd. I guess he and I will have something to talk about!
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