[CoffeeDregs]

    A PE firm usually buys when they think they see cost cutting opportunity.

The PE firm buys things in which it sees opportunity. Often-times, the opportunity is to cut: the management team's adventurist streak in markets; weak products; bloated staff.

Other times, they might recognize that a company needs capital to get bigger faster in order to address an expanding market. In this case, I think the thesis might be: cloud deployments and migrations are exploding; ThoughtWorks has the thought leaders; "roll up" other consulting firms into ThoughtWorks; dominate the market. A friend's consulting firm was just bought for this exact reason. Something very similar happened to Pivotal.

[mbesto]

This. I work with PE firms every day and this is essentially how they operate.

Consulting has notoriously low multiples and so if you couple a consulting business with a "computing/services" business you increase the multiple over night.

I expect this page to expand drastically over the years:

https://www.thoughtworks.com/products

[CoffeeDregs]

That's exactly what happened to Pivotal. Boutique consulting shop turned into a consulting/services behemoth by strategic investments and business flow.

[jacques_chester]

> That's exactly what happened to Pivotal.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal.

The original Pivotal Labs was founded in 1989. Rob Mee sold to EMC in 2012.

A little later (circa 2013), EMC and VMWare took a number of teams and assets (notably Labs, Cloud Foundry, Greenplum, Gemfire and Spring) and spun them out into a new company, which was called Pivotal.

Pivotal is basically three divisions: Labs, Cloud R&D, Data.

Pivotal Labs is the consulting wing, there is a lot of cultural and conceptual overlap with ThoughtWorks. The Labs division is the most recognisably direct descendant of the original company Rob Mee founded. Its offerings and work have broadened over time.

Cloud R&D is responsible for Cloud Foundry (including our commercial distribution PivotalCF), KuBo, Spring, Pivotal Tracker and I always forget something or someone.

Data is responsible for Greenplum and Gemfire and a number of related technologies (eg HAWQ).

It's a complicated history, because nearly every part of Pivotal has a history that predates Pivotal.

[tyingq]

Behemoth might be a little strong. I don't know how many of the employees are consulting/services vs product, but the total is 2300. They are also somewhat niche in their consulting. They won't do gigs that use stacks that compete with PCF for example, and have a very fixed model (your employees sit with them at the Pivotal shop)

I agree they've been successful.

[tyingq]

Ford, EMC, and Microsoft are not what I meant by a typical PE firm...that's who invested in Pivotal.

I meant firms like TPG, Blackstone, Silverlake, etc. I suppose they do sometimes stray from the model, but the rabid cost cutting is pretty typical.

[CoffeeDregs]

My point about Pivotal was not about the investor; it was about the similar investment thesis.

    the rabid cost cutting is pretty typical.

True, if the thesis is around bloat, mal-investment, adventurism, etc. If the theory is something like "tech talent roll-up in the face of an industry-wide cloud migration", then cabid cost-cutting would be disastrous (modulo all of the SG&A position eliminating)...

[madeofpalk]

Very similar thing is happening with 'digital agencies' being bought by larger advertising agencies and big international consultancies, like Accenture.

[charlesdm]

Cost cutting / financial engineering / tax reductions / resource optimisation. It won't be a fun place to work in the next 3-5 years. That raise you think you'll be getting? Don't think so.