You know big things are happening when your company name loses some letters. Case in point: Pivotal Software, now known on the New York Stock Exchange as PVTL.
Dated April 20, the listing on the NYSE follows growth that includes reaching 319 subscribing customers – and scoring big names like Ford – in four years. By 2018, the San Francisco-based company's total headcount surpassed 2,500 in February and its revenue hit $509.4 million, more than half of which was from subscribers, according to Pivotal's prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For perspective, by 2016, the company was pulling in just over half that at close to $281 million in revenue.
Just a week after Pivotal Software listed on NYSE, BostInno spoke with Simon Holroyd, head of the software consulting company’s Pivotal Labs office in Cambridge, one of about 20 similar labs located world-wide.
BostInno: How would you, in very simple terms … describe what you do for your clients?
Holroyd: A problem that a lot of our clients come to us with is that they have historically approached building software products as a very long process. Typically, they might be putting out a new product into the market on the time scale of years, rather than months or days. Our business is really around helping our clients (release) software more quickly, so that they can get feedback on it, so that they can get revenue or cost savings out of it … and so that they can overall reduce the risk of building the wrong thing or something unsustainable.
BostInno: Is this partly because these guys are not necessarily in the software-making business?
Holroyd: Yes … historically, they’ve been, maybe, a manufacturing business, or they’ve been an insurance business, or they’ve been the military… and they are now recognizing they really need to be in the software business.
BostInno: Talk about the Cambridge office and how it’s grown.
Holroyd: We’ve had a presence in Boston since 2013 (with a few people), but we’ve started in earnest building the team here in about 2015. I was early in getting a start in the Boston market. Our labs are where we co-develop our software with our clients. My team is a team of consultants across three core disciplines: product management, product design and software engineering.
BostInno: How many people are in your Cambridge location?
Holroyd: My team is sized to do about five to seven client engagements at a time. The size ebbs and flows a bit – we bring resources in from other offices and loan resources out. We’re at about 25 people currently. We have grown quite a lot recently. Probably this same time last year, we were about 15 people.
BostInno: What does Pivotal’s listing on NYSE mean for your office?
Holroyd: It was a really exciting event for us, and a milestone. It was kind of a recognition that what we're doing is working. (But our Cambridge) business is really doing the same thing that we’ve been doing for the last three years… So not much change there.
BostInno: Do you expect any growth locally at all?
Holroyd: We are hiring at the moment. We have some openings. I’m not necessarily forecasting the same sort of growth that we’ve seen over the past year, but we will continue to grow.
BostInno: You have ties to the area and went to Tufts. What do you see as some of the advantages of being located around Boston?
Holroyd: Certainly we are benefiting from the incredible educational institutions around here, both in terms of the talent that we are hiring and from the perspective of being in a tech hub, and being in the community.
BostInno: What changes have you see here in terms of the startup scene?
Holroyd: I left Boston in 2010 to go and work at a startup in New York. The startup scene in Boston at that time certainly was not as exciting as it is now. It was maybe just starting its growth spurt then. I’ve come back to an environment where there’s far more resources available to new software development teams, new product development teams and startups now than there was back then.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
