Given the history of Pivotal, it’s a blockbuster.
When we first started learning About Spring Boot, we were sure to see this sentence:
Spring Boot is a new framework from the Pivotal team designed to simplify the initial setup and development process for new Spring applications.
The Pivotal team must be Spring Boot’s development team, so what exactly is the Pivotal team? What is the relationship with Spring? Take your time and listen to me.
To start with the origin of Pivotal, I have to start with the Spring Enterprise line.
The development of the Spring
Back in 2002, when Java EE and EJB were in the ascendancy, many well-known companies were using this technology solution for project development. There was a guy in the US who thought EJBs were too bloated, that not all projects needed to use ejBs as a large framework, and that there was a better solution to this problem.
To prove his point, he wrote a book, Expert One-On-One J2EE, in October 2002 that covered the state of Java enterprise application development at the time and pointed out some of the major flaws in Java EE and EJB component frameworks. In this book, he proposes a simpler solution based on ordinary Java classes and dependency injection.
In the book, he shows how to build high-quality, scalable online seat-reservation systems without using EJBs. He wrote more than 30,000 lines of infrastructure code to build the application, and the root package in the project was named com.Interface21, so the open source framework was originally called Interface21, a precursor to Spring.
Who is this young man? He is the famous Rod Johnson (pictured below), who earned a degree in computer science at the University of Sydney, as well as a degree in music and, amazingly, a PhD in musicology before returning to software development. Rod Johnson has now left Spring to become an angel investor and board member of several companies, well on his way to the top.
One-on-one J2EE design and development exploded after the book was released. Most of the infrastructure code that is freely available in this book is highly reusable. In 2003, Rod Johnson and his partners developed a brand new framework named Spring based on this framework. According to Rod Johnson, Spring is the new beginning of traditional J2EE, and then the development of Spring entered the fast lane.
- In March 2004, version 1.0 was released.
- In October 2006, version 2.0 was released.
- In November 2007, the name was changed to SpringSource and Spring 2.5 was released.
- In December 2009, Spring 3.0 was released.
- In December 2013, Pivotal announced the release of the Spring Framework 4.0.
- In September 2017, Spring 5.0 was released.
There is a chart on the web that clearly shows Spring’s development:
From the timeline above, we can see that the Pivotal team and Spring crossed lines in 2013. Why?
Cue a flurry of tech mergers and acquisitions.
Pivotal company
The Pivotal Team refers to the Pivotal Company. Here’s a brief introduction of Pivotal:
Founded in April 2013, Pivotal is committed to “transforming how the world builds Software” by providing a cloud-native app development PaaS platform and services. Help enterprise customers adopt agile software development methodologies to improve software developer productivity, reduce operation and maintenance costs, achieve digital transformation, IT innovation, and ultimately business innovation.
To date, more than one-third of fortune 100 companies use Pivotal’s cloud-native platform. For some of Pivotal’s largest customers, the ratio of developers to operations increased to 200:1 with the adoption of Pivotal’s products, and the time developers spent writing software code increased by 50%.
After reading the introduction, you may be a little confused. Isn’t this an IT service company founded in 2013? How is IT related to Spring, which was developed in 2002? In fact, the origins of Pivotal can be traced back to 1989 as Pivotal Labs.
Pivotal Labs company
In 1989, Rob Mee founded Pivotal Labs, a consulting firm focused on rapid Internet-based software development, or agile programming. Pivotal Labs was founded as a very small software consulting firm, working with customers to help them develop software.
Pivotal Labs has long been a leader in agile development, shaping the software development culture and reputation of some of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, including Google and Twitter.
Fast forward to 2012, and Pivotal, beloved by customers, finally caught the attention of EMC, the business software giant, which acquired Pivotal in 2012 for cash and took on all of its 200 employees.
The company didn’t change much at first, but as part of EMC as a new division, Pivotal Labs continued to work with customers as before.
But then, in 2013, EMC dropped a bombshell. It spun off the core business of Pivotal Labs into a new company called Pivotal Software. The new company, which is owned by EMC, VMware and GENERAL Electric, will be led by Maritz, who previously served as CEO of EMC subsidiary VMware.
EMC and VMware spun off their Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Labs, Greenplum and other Cloud computing and big data resources, while GE invested $105 million to form Pivotal. Pivotal, a young company, is a real rich kid, valued at $1.05 billion.
So what does EMC have to do with VMware?
In December 2003, EMC announced its acquisition of VMware for $635 million.
Founded in 1979 in Hopkinton, Mass., EMC entered the enterprise data storage market in 1989. For more than two decades, EMC has invested heavily in new storage technologies and has received 1,300 approved or pending storage patents. EMC is a recognized leader in storage expertise, whether it is global external RAID storage systems, network storage or storage management software.
EMC is the world’s sixth largest enterprise software company and a leading developer and provider of global information infrastructure technologies and solutions. It is also one of the Fortune 500 in the United States, with more than 42,000 employees worldwide and branches in 60 countries or regions around the world. We are in contact with various EMC storage products.
The secret of EMC’s success lies in the two-wheel drive of R&D and m&a. R&d and M&A accounted for 22% of the company’s annual revenue, slightly higher than R&D. EMC spent more than $42 billion on r&d and acquisitions over the 12 years from 2003 to 2015. Of that, $20.6 billion went to research and development, and $21.3 billion went to mergers and acquisitions, totaling more than 100 companies.
VMware acquisition of Spring
A turning point for Spring enterprise came in 2009, when VMware acquired Spring Source for $420 million (360 million in cash plus 58 million shares).
VMware invented virtualization
VMware, founded in 1998 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, is a global cloud infrastructure and mobile commerce solution manufacturer. It provides solutions based on VMware. Enterprises maintain customer trust through data center transformation and public cloud integration and enterprise security transformation. To run, manage, connect and protect any application on any cloud and device. Revenue for fiscal 2018 was $7.92 billion.
I believe that as research and development personnel must have used VMware products, the most commonly used VMware virtual machine products, but in fact, VMware company’s product line is very many.
From the perspective of development path, VMware has three characteristics:
- Virtualization has been around since the ’70s, but VMware was the first to apply this technology to X86 servers and improve on it to meet the needs of enterprise customers.
- The second is to target large corporate customers. When VMware went public, it had less than $400 million in annual revenue, but it already covered 80% of Fortune 1000 customers.
- Third, it is highly productized. VMware has long had a gross margin of around 85%, very little consulting, and leaves almost all deployment to partners.
VMware is also a big mergers and acquisitions, through investment and acquisition to complement the business line, customer resources is a major advantage.
In 2012, Rod Johnson announced that he was leaving Spring Source.
EMC was acquired again
Back in 2015, it was widely reported that EMC was considering a takeover of quilt company VMware. It was surprising that there was such a commotion. Why?
EMC bought VMware for $625 million in 2003. Four years later, EMC took VMware public in a spin-off. As a result, VMware, which was publicly traded on its own, is doing better and better, while EMC’s businesses continue to suffer. By 2015, VMware was worth about $37 billion, or nearly 75% of EMC’s total market value.
The parties’ interests may not be aligned and EMC may end up being acquired by Dell (DELL).
On October 12, 2015, Dell and EMC Announced the signing of a definitive agreement, in which Dell, its founder, Chairman and CHIEF Executive Officer, Michael Dell, together with MSD Partners and Silver Lake Capital, will acquire EMC For $67 billion. The biggest merger in tech history.
VMware, the cloud computing software company that was the industry’s biggest concern at the time, remained an independent, publicly traded company. EMC currently owns about 80 per cent of VMware and has a market value of about $32bn. And Dell’s acquisition of EMC is actually a sword, VMware is the key to Dell’s acquisition of EMC.
Dale’s Story
PCs Limited was founded in 1984 by Michael Dell while he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1985, the company produced its first computer with its own unique design, the “Turbo PC,” which sold for $795. Since then, the development history of Dell has begun. The following are the milestones of Dell
- 1984-19-year-old Michael Dell launches PC’s Limited with $1,000 and a vision to disrupt the technology industry.
- 1988 – We complete an INITIAL public offering, raising $30 million and increasing our market cap from $1,000 to $85 million.
- 1992 – Dell joins the Fortune 500 and Michael Dell becomes the youngest CEO on the list.
- 1996 – Dell.com launches. Within six months of launching, the site was selling $1 million a day.
- 2001 – Dell becomes the world’s no. 1 computer system provider.
- 2005 – Dell ranks No. 1 on Fortune magazine’s “America’s Most Admired Companies” list.
- 2010 – Dell is ranked the World’s No. 1 provider of healthcare INFORMATION technology services by Gartner, Inc.
- 2013 – Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners buy back Dell shares from public shareholders, aiming to accelerate the implementation of a solution strategy and focus on innovation and long-term investing that most clients value. 2016 – Dell and EMC merge into Dell Technologies, the industry’s largest technology integration event. Dell offered the job
In 2018, it was reported that VMware was opposed to the acquisition of Dell? I’m getting a little messed up writing this, right? Dell acquired EMC and ECM acquired VMware, so VMware is dell’s great-grandson, so why VMware is opposing dell’s acquisition?
On October 12, 2015, dell announced its acquisition of EMC (including VMware), when VMware’s stock was trading at around $60- $70. In September 2016, Dell announced that it was formally acquiring EMC, including VMware, but leaving VMware as a standalone company, with VMware’s stock still trading around $70.
However, at the beginning of 2018, VMware’s share price has reached more than 130 DOLLARS. At the peak of 2018, VMware’s share price even reached more than 160 dollars, and the stock price has more than doubled. VMware is developing very well. VMware’s latest market value was nearly $600 billion, compared with more than $20 billion at the time of the acquisition.
Rumors were just rumors, and in July 2018, Dell chose to go public as an independent company, owning 80% of VMware.
M&a timetable
It’s a bit confusing, but here’s a recap of some of the key acquisition dates:
- Rob Mee founded Pivotal Labs in 1989;
- Spring was founded in 2003 by Rod Johnson and his colleagues;
- EMC acquired VMware in 2003;
- VMware acquired Spring in 2009;
- In 2012, EMC acquired Pivotal Labs;
- In 2013, EMC, VMware, and Pivotal Labs merged to form Pivotal;
- In 2015, Dell acquired EMC;
- Dell went public independently in 2018.
Moving on to Pivotal
The above series of commercial mergers and acquisitions are dazzling, but it’s important to know that Pivotal is a company of noble origin, a joint venture of several fortune 500 companies that are not too poor. Pivotal’s products are so high that even the 12306 we usually use uses their products.
Pivotal has a lot of talent, and its open source products include: Spring and Spring derivatives, Web server Tomcat, cache middleware Redis, messaging middleware RabbitMQ, platform as a service Cloud Foundry, Greenplum data engine, and the big names GemFire (one of 12306 System Solution components).
Some of the answers to why Spring Boot is so good can be found in Pivotal, where the developers behind these famous open source products are all from around the world.
Founded in 2010 as EMC’s Greenplum division, Pivotal China is dedicated to the development and delivery of the following products and services: Pivotal Web Service (PWS), Pivotal Hadoop (PHD), Hawq and Greenplum Database (GPDB).
Pivotal Technology (Beijing) Co., LTD. (Pivotal China) was founded and operated independently on March 1, 2015.
After founding Pivotal, the company released Spring Boot in 2014, Spring Cloud in 2015, and went public in New York in 2018. There’s one chart that illustrates the evolution of Pivotal.
Pivotal is positioned as a company that combines the next generation of cloud computing and big data applications, while VMWare and EMC remain focused on software-defined data centers and information infrastructure.
According to its website, “Pivotal provides the tools to help developers build better software, the platform that lets you run your applications in any cloud environment, and help you build the future.”
The company’s products fall into three main categories: deployment and running software; planning, building and integrating software; and analysis and decision making
Deploy and run the software
- Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), a multi-cloud platform for rapid delivery of applications, containers, and functions.
- PCF: Pivotal Application Service, which runs applications built in any language on a highly available self-service platform with built-in logging, monitoring, and automatic extension.
- PCF: Pivotal Container Service builds applications based on an enterprise-class Kubernetes environment that uses on-demand clustering, rolling upgrades, and software-defined networks provided by VMware NSX.
- Pivotal Services Marketplace, which combines your applications with hosted, brokered, or on-demand Services. Products cover data management, API management, messaging, logging, and more.
Plan, build, and integrate software
- Spirng Boot, a leading Java framework for rapidly building powerful applications and services.
- Spirng Cloud, incorporating proven microservices models into your software. Provides configuration storage, service discovery, and message passing functions.
- Steeltoe, inspired by Spring Cloud, uses this framework to build resilient and extensible software. .net applications.
- Pivotal Cloud Cache, a fast and highly available Cache based on Pivotal GemFire, provides geographic replication and background writes.
- Pivotal GemFire, which uses a scalable, event-driven distributed data grid to perform in-memory computing. 12306 uses the business plan.
- RabbitMQ, with the help of this popular messaging agent, separates services and extends processing.
- Pivotal Tracker, a proven project management tool, helps you build successful Agile teams.
- Concourse, using automated pipelines to achieve continuous upgrade of PCF.
Analysis and decision making
- Pivotal Greenplum, a full-featured multi-cloud massively Parallel processing (MPP) data platform for advanced analysis of large datasets.
- Apache MADlib, which performs in-database analysis by implementing mathematical, statistical, and machine learning approaches to multi-structured data in a data-parallel manner.
Pivotal’s products include Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, RabbitMQ and other well-known open source software, as well as many commercial solutions like GemFire, which can be found through its own products. While building an ecosystem through open source software, On the one hand, make money with business solutions.
There was a time when I was asked a question: Does open source mean free, not free services, not open source software? This business model is actually a refutation to this view, open source is not equal to free, open source is a spirit of open sharing, do not want to come to the domestic taste.
Pivotal has mastered many cutting-edge open source technologies. The company provides a complete set of big data solutions from cloud deployment to development to platform to providing solutions to consulting, which can be said to be a model of making money by relying on technology and a model of our generation.
Spring-boot-examples is an open source project for learning Spring Boot
reference
It’s time for Pivotal to be a rich kid! Five years to $6 billion market value, the first wave of Pivotal PaaS rise way | love the analysis research