Pivotal Software, Inc. was an American multinational

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

and services

company A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether Natural person, natural, Juridical person, juridical or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members ...

based in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

that provided cloud platform hosting and consulting services. Since November 2023, Pivotal has been part of

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American multinational corporation, multinational designer, developer, manufacturer, and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data cen ...

History

Pivotal Software was formed in 2012 after spinning out of

EMC Corporation EMC Corporation (stylized as EMC²) was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which sold data storage device, data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other pro ...

and VMware (which was majority-owned by EMC). The name came from the Pivotal Labs LLC which had been acquired by EMC, and briefly used the name GoPivotal, Incorporated. On April 24, 2013, the organization announced a investment from

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston. Over the year ...

(for 10% equity) and Pivotal One, including

Cloud Foundry Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization. The software was originally developed by VMware, transferred to Pivotal Software (a joint ...

for

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

. Paul Maritz became Pivotal's chief executive immediately after the spin-out. Maritz had joined EMC in February 2008 when Pi Corporation, a company he co-founded, was acquired and was previously the CEO of VMware. The Greenplum Database (acquired by EMC in 2010) formed the basis of a division selling software for the

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

market. In March 2013, a distribution of

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model. Hadoop wa ...

called Pivotal HD was announced, including a version of the Greenplum software for it called Hawq. Paul Maritz became Pivotal's Chairman and Rob Mee, founder of Pivotal Labs, became

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of Pivotal Software on August 18, 2015. In May 2016, a round of investment was announced, including Ford investments. EMC also converted of debt into equity at that time. In March 2018, the company filed for an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

, debuting on the

NYSE The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...

on April 20, 2018. The trading price began at $15 a share, and closed with a 5% increase on its first day. The company raised $555 million in the IPO. On August 14, 2019, VMware announced merger discussions with Pivotal, and a definitive agreement to acquire Pivotal Software was signed on August 22, 2019. The merger was completed on December 30, 2019. VMware folded Pivotal into the Tanzu application suite, with the Pivotal Labs consulting group rebranding to become VMware Tanzu Labs in January 2021.

References

{{Dell Dell acquisitions Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 2013 Companies formerly listed on the New York Stock Exchange 2018 initial public offerings Companies based in San Francisco Companies based in Palo Alto, California Corporate spin-offs 2019 mergers and acquisitions VMware Defunct software companies of the United States 2013 establishments in California American companies established in 2013

History

See also

References