Pivotal Rolls Out Benchmark to Help Enterprises Become Software Companies

(Pictured above, left to right: Dell’s Stella Low, Merrill Corp.’s Thomas Fredell, Aon’s Rajeev Khanna and Pivotal Software’s Edward Hieatt.)

DELL TECHNOLOGIES WORLD — Pivotal Software, a Dell Technologies company, on Wednesday unveiled its Built to Adapt Benchmark, a quantitative framework of indicators that gauges how well an organization builds and operates software.

The announcement was made during the final day of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. Last month, Pivotal, a cloud software company, became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Pivotal partnered with Longitude Research and Ovum to assess more than 1,600 of the world’s top organizations in six countries and across five industries. It believes every company must become a software company. Fast organizations – not necessarily large organizations – will succeed in the cloud era, and enterprises must turn their mass into momentum, it said.

“Business leaders say, ‘How do we know what we’re doing, if we’re succeeding, if we’re aligning people correctly?'” said Edward Hieatt, Pivotal’s senior vice president of services. “[The benchmark] is a way to think about everything we’ve learned — why it is important that enterprises become a software company. There’s been a radical shift in how software is built and there’s much more innovative business models. So for us, how do we help companies jump into the future in terms of writing software? We’re saying, “Become a software company, put it in your DNA, and Pivotal is here to help.”

Hieatt tells Channel Futures the benchmark is good news for the channel.

“This is more of an aligning thing between business and IT, so in that sense it actually frees up the right kind of capital investments that the business is actually more interested in making than purely IT thinking alone, and so it’s a good thing for the community around the products,” he said. “There’s a lot of pressure in the industry right now, whether it’s services partners or channel-selling partners, to stay relevant in this conversation. How is it the established SIs, for example, show up as ready and willing to help in this new way of thinking? And these measurements only help that community understand what  customers are looking for [and] how they align with industry leaders around these new practices. This is codifying in a sense for what good looks like, so it’s very aligning and helps everyone stay relevant.”

Each benchmark indicator is designed to promote focus on building software that delivers business value. Pivotal defines five business outcomes that effective software development supports: speed, stability, scalability, security and savings.

Companies can compare their own performance with that of their peers by filling out the online benchmark questionnaire.

Development teams should be able to deploy their applications to production as quickly as possible, so lead time is one indicator that addresses operations speed, Hieatt said. Getting frequent customer feedback allows teams to modify applications quickly based on customer needs, he said.

Savings in operations means that a small operations team can keep costs down by managing thousands of applications using a highly automated platform and DevOps techniques, according to Pivotal.

Merrill Corp. provides a SaaS application for due diligence that’s used in M&A deals globally. Thomas Fredell, its chief product officer, said Pivotal’s benchmark has been a “tremendous” part of his company’s digital transformation.

“Everything from engaging with customers to delivering solutions (is my job),” he said. “What it meant was paring our portfolio down. We sold off some parts of the business that were less focused on software and (introduced a new platform) that allows us to move very quickly.”