I’m Joining Pivotal

Danny (George Clooney): Saul makes ten. Ten oughta do it, don’t you think?

Rusty (Brad Pitt): …

Danny: Do you think we need one more?

Rusty: …

Danny: You think we need one more.

Rusty: …

Danny: Alright. We’ll get one more.

That’s one of my favorite scenes from the movie Ocean’s Eleven. It was also the analogy used by Pivotal when we started talking about me coming aboard; they’re known for occasionally recruiting folks they want, even if there’s no pre-existing job posting (“we’ll get one more”). After some phone discussions and in-person get-togethers, we all agreed that it would be a great fit. So, I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined Pivotal as a Senior Director of Product, based in Seattle. I’ll be helping frame Pivotal’s all-up platform story, engaging with customers, and working with the team to improve our products and spread the cloud-native message.

I accepted Pivotal’s offer for three reasons: the people, the purpose, and the products.

The People

I’m spoiled. After spending the last four years with a ridiculously talented cloud group at Tier3/CenturyLink, I place a premium on working with exceptional teams. What’s impressed me time and time again with Pivotal is that the talent goes both deep and wide. While you may know many of their more public-facing experts on app dev, distributed systems, and cloud — such as James Watters, Andrew Clay Shafer, Josh McKenty, Ian Andrews, Ben Black, Cotè, Bridget Kromhout, Josh Long, Matt Stine, Casey West, and James Bayer — there seem to be countless, exceptional Pivots across the engineering and Labs groups. My career goal is to always work with people smarter than me, but this is almost excessive! I’m excited to work alongside people at the top of their game (and we’re hiring tons more!), and doing my part to help our customers succeed.

The Purpose

I need to feel connected to the mission of the company that I work for. Pivotal makes that easy: Transform how the world builds software. Yes, please. Pivotal is committed to providing products and coaching that help companies of all sizes use technology to innovate faster. If you haven’t watched Pivotal VP of Engineering Onsi Fakhouri’s recent presentation that drives home this message in an inspirational way, you should. What’s great is that besides having 40+ fantastic product engineering teams, Pivotal also has a strong coaching and consulting arm in Pivotal Labs.

Look at how we’ve traditionally designed, developed, packaged, deployed and managed systems.Everything’s changing and Pivotal is at the forefront of this transformation. But it’s not about changing your technology or methodology just for the sake of it; the core goal is to improve business performance through better software! Pivotal is all about helping companies make a meaningful transformation, and I love it. And this approach is clearly resonating with the largest companies in the world.

https://twitter.com/wattersjames/status/715040771829841922

The Products

Our flagship product is Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), a commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry — the industry-leading, open source cloud-native app platform. PCF is more than just a wrapping of vendor support around something you can get for free. Rather, it represents a complete platform for (1) installing and updating Cloud Foundry software and services on a variety of (cloud) hosts, (2) cataloging and consuming a wide variety of application services, (3) creating, packaging, and deploying custom apps,  and (4) managing the app lifecycle.

Many people actually know Pivotal because of Pivotal Tracker. It’s one of the first agile planning tools, and remains extremely popular. Pivotal also has an exceptional Big Data Suite where customers can make sense of data faster, and use that new insight to make better business decisions and design more relevant software.

In addition to building commercial products, Pivotal invests heavily in open source. Did you know that Pivotal puts a significant number of engineers not just on the Cloud Foundry OSS effort, but on projects like RabbitMQ , Concourse CI, and Spring? The adoption of Spring and Spring Cloud  during the past year has been insane as companies embrace the patterns and technology pioneered by industry leaders like Netflix. Pivotal makes a serious commitment to both commercial and open source products, and that makes for a very exciting place to work.

Pivotal’s people, purpose, and products are hard to match, and it’s made me very eager to show up to the office today.