[maxawaytoolong]

Twitter is a unique case in that their engineers in 2009 were even worse than the ones at Pivotal. They still had outages every day, so how good could the "pivots" have been?

But my point still stands as Twitter did not renew their contract...

It's also not what I've "been hearing"... I've had to work directly with Pivotal people.

[ekidd]

Thank you for your first-hand experience!

I was curious about Pivotal's consulting work, because even very good software consulting companies go downhill quickly when they try to scale. Joel Spolsky described it perfectly: I don't need to name names, here, this cycle has happened a dozen times. All the IT service companies get greedy and try to grow faster than they can find talented people, and they grow layers upon layers of rules and procedures which help produce "consistent," if not very brilliant work.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html

If Pivotal has a nucleus of really talented people, it makes sense for them to become a scalable product company. (Although I'm not really convinced by Pivotal's proposed pricing plans, at least for consultants with several smaller projects going on at once.)