[tpurves]

Their S1 filing actually provides an easy to read description of their business:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918...

to paraphrase:

Besides consulting and software development (Labs), their main product is PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry). Basically it helps combine the best bits of cloud centric, automated, containerized tools - without locking you in and letting you be portable across AWS, Google, Azure or private clouds.

The big thing here is that there is a massive opportunity of large companies still managing large monolithic apps with slow, expensive horribly inefficient infrastructure and deployment practices. Pivotal helps (especially bigCo.'s) rebuild their whole app infrastructure as well as transform their culture of software development. The biggest thing, according to their case studies, is that both speed of development as well as the ratio of 'ops' headcount to 'developer' headcount can be significantly improved.

[AndrewKemendo]

Thanks for this description. So it seems to me that they are consultants who come in to a non-engineering focused company and kind of "train" their engineers to work in a certain way on their own tools and then run a subscription model on those tools.

Pretty smart way to do it - and I can see how it would be really aggravating from a power-user/10x engineer perspective.