Business Canvas Model on Pivotal Software

This report discusses the business canvas model of Pivotal Software, a service software company, and its nine building blocks. It also explores the company's customer segments, key partners, key activities, customer relationship, channels, cost structure, revenue streams, key resources, value proposition, critical success factors, downside risk, business model changes, and recommendations.

THINK BIG

Executive summary
This report brings out a discussion on business canvas model with the help of nine building
blocks on Pivotal software. Nine building blocks are the basic blocks, which a business uses,
and enhance its business and get competitive advantage among its competitors. Pivotal
software is a software service- based company that strives to generate maximum sales by
strengthening its security services to its customers.

Contents
Executive summary....................................................................................................................1
Pivotal software..........................................................................................................................4
Business model...........................................................................................................................4
Building blocks.......................................................................................................................4
Customer segments.................................................................................................................4
Key Partners...........................................................................................................................5
Key activities..........................................................................................................................5
Customer relationship.............................................................................................................6
Channels.................................................................................................................................6
Cost structure..........................................................................................................................6
Revenue streams.....................................................................................................................6
Key resources.........................................................................................................................6
Value proposition...................................................................................................................6
Critical success factors...........................................................................................................7
Downside risk.........................................................................................................................7
Business model changes.........................................................................................................8
Critical thinking of weaknesses and strengths........................................................................8
Quality of communication......................................................................................................9
Recommendation....................................................................................................................9
Conclusion............................................................................................................................10

Appendix-1...............................................................................................................................11
Business Canvas Model...........................................................................................................11
Appendix-2...............................................................................................................................14
References................................................................................................................................15

Pivotal software
Pivotal software is a service software company headquartered in San Francisco, California.
The company was founded in 2012. Pivotal delivers application related services to
Multinational companies (Pivotal Software, 2019a). Organisation deploy application and
pivotal services to work on JAVA, Node apps, and NET on pivotal cloud foundry (Pivotal
Software, Inc 2019).
Business model
Business model is a tabular strategic template, which is used to describe key activities,
channel, value proposition, key partners, consumer segments, consumer relationship, cost
structure, and revenue streams for the organisation (Pivotal Software, Inc 2019).
Building blocks
Nine building approach elaborates business model canvas of pivotal software (Appendix-1).
Customer segments
The company provides various software assistance to asset management organisations, real
estate organisation, and banking institutions (Pivotal Software, Inc, 2019). Pivotal software
provides service to high profile customers such as IRS, BMW, Mercedes, Lockheed Martin,
and Comcast (Businesswire, 2019).
Key Partners
The company operates with different companies that has developed, distributed, and
integrated its products. Some of the strategic partners include Cisco, Microsoft, and Google
who share their resources in order to work together for investment and joint projects
(Salesforce, 2018). Below are the key partners of the company-

(Source: Tasevska, 2017)
Key activities
Pivotal software is a renowned software company that involves solving software. It involves
creation of software application in order to solve software problems. The main products are
platform services and pivotal CF that will help the development teams to design and update
applications on cloud (Tech target, 2019). The company offers a wide range of ancillary
services such as security, telecommunication solutions, and analytics. The company
entertains commercial customers across several sectors such as health, media, public,
technology, and other industries (Sedano, Ralph, & Péraire, 2017).
Customer relationship
The company pace up its sales with the assistance of in-built sales team which directly
interact with customers so that it can serve service to individual needs. Once, the sales is
incurred then the company provides self-service facilities, which allow the customers to
access organisation`s products, information, resources, and services from the website of the
company (Sedano, Ralph, & Péraire, 2017).

Channels
Pivotal software offers cloud-hosted online platform, which provides easy access to
homepage of the website so that customers can be registered easily and can have an account
with Pivotal. The company has the core network of 19 offices across Dublin, Singapore,
North America, and Toronto (Pivotal software, 2019).
Cost structure
The company incurs expenses that has resulted in development of solutions related to
software, manage partnership, and retain efficient personnel (Pivotal software, 2019).
Revenue streams
The company receives revenue after generating the sales of different software. The company
can derive the revenue from the subscription fee from the regular customers. The company
generates revenue by providing certain professional services such as training and consulting
(Pivotal software, 2019a).
Key resources
US patent and trademark agency has identified more than 30 patent application that has been
registered from the name of Pivotal. The company owns intellectual properties, which is a
key for successful business operations (Pivotal software, 2019).
Value proposition
The company creates value for its customers. It serves to huge network of international
customers and clients who operates offices in Germany, US, Ireland, and US (Pivotal
software, 2018).
Critical success factors
In order to prove its software, Pivotal software has chosen cloud foundry as a platform so that
it can encourage and empower its customers to extend its customised application. While

integrating and extending the enterprise application, the company faces challenges related to
software. Cloud foundry has a significant role while prioritising it as its critical success
factor. In order to decide an estimate for growth, the company will head forward with higher
sales growth in the first quarter of 2019 (EMA Pivotal, 2018). CEO of the company has said
that they have achieved a revenue growth of 69% and 28% of entire revenue is driven to
expand the use of software and get subscription amount from the current customers
(Toolshero, 2018).
(Source: EMA Pivotal, 2018)
Downside risk
In financial terms, the company can face problem and risk if it raises from IPO because it is
associated with dell related investments. Whereas, funds raised with the name of the
company will remain with the company in future. IPO provides a solution for the cash
shortage situations faced by Silver Lake Partner and Dell. Analysts of the company have
predicted that silver lake has expected higher returns after investing in relation to dell. Pivotal
software is aiming to improve security postures that have complied with Pivotal Cloud
Foundry (PCF) built-in capabilities (Pivotal Software, 2019a). Pivotal Cloud Foundry helps
the company to keep and convert the code language with IP sec Add-on by using the code
method of securing data. In order to protect the data from the advanced threat, the company
uses Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The company have started generating double revenue of $509
million in 2018 whereas it was $280.8 million in 2016 (EMA Pivotal, 2018).

Business model changes
The company has improved its strategies in order to reduce the losses that it has incurred
when it started operating-
Fiscal Year 2016 2017 2018
Net losses $282.7 million $232.9 million $163.5 million
The company reserves has faced a deficit of $1.1 billion (EMA Pivotal, 2018). The company
has elaborated in the prospectus of this year`s operating expenses will increase because the
company hire new employees and will also incur additional sales, open new offices and set-
ups, research and development, additional cost of legalities and other expenses of getting
registered as a public company (Businesswire, 2019).
Critical thinking of weaknesses and strengths
Strength of the company lies in its core values that give it an opportunity to reshape potential
of cloud computing. The sustainable business model identifies some opportunity factors that
will improve the future of cloud computing (Pivotal Software, 2019b). Some of the strengths
are-
Cost factor- cost intensity in IT sector plays significant part in decision-making. Flexibility
opens new opportunities by considering reduction in pricing ability. It has reduced the fixed
costs as it was converted to variable costs that further reduces the assets of the company
indicating that software is developed with low capital (Pivotal Software, 2019b). It is
important for the company to retain the customers, which will be executed when customers
are satisfied with company`s security services. Cloud computing offers extensive range of
services such as security control, monitoring, and maintaining in order to protect the data
(Enterprising Oxford, 2018).

Trust issues have remained a risk in cloud computing. Major weaknesses and risks are related
to security and trust. Performance, control, and security issues enforce company to make
business model and this business model will help the company to give greater priority to
sustainable growth. Any category of services and loss of control can discomfort the
customers that affect the company`s operation positively (Enterprising Oxford, 2018).
Quality of communication
Until now, traffic on the applications had to pass through cloud foundry router. Addition of
CF networking stack and users creating policies, which directly communicate to each other
by improving the security and performance (Pivotal Software, 2019b).
The company uses container-to-container networking which offers a method of
communicating with one another. This includes core components such as garden external
networker, cloud foundry, policy server, command line interface, and application security
group that can affect traffic from app usage at the same time (Pivotal Software, 2019b).
Recommendation
The company should become customer centric and understand customer behaviour. Further,
the company should strive to understand the security of cloud that will attract more
subscription from the current customers and induce new customers to buy application. San
Francisco office branch of the company will teach client`s engineer so that customers can
execute same kind of application as lab product of Pivotal. Apart from this, the company
should improve some metrics in order to better its software (Green, 2018).
Speed- Company should build more such applications in order to serve customers’ needs as
soon as possible (Pivotal software, 2019c).
Stability- the company must appoint another internal team that remained a reliable dial tone
for all the software platform services (Green, 2018).

Conclusion
The above discussion brings out an analytical report on business canvas model on a software
company. Report on Pivotal software has identified opportunities and threats available in the
dynamic business environment. It has been seen that the company has not successfully raised
money through IPO. Cloud computing offers ability in order to develop web application.
Companies often use communication channels with the help of cloud foundry that gives
communication chances for micro services. The company offers cloud-computing services to
various sectors such as healthcare, and financial services.

Appendix-1
Business Canvas Model
Name of the organisation: Pivotal Software

Appendix-2
IPO of Pivotal Software's
(Source: Alexander, 2018)

References
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https://seekingalpha.com/article/4158851-first-look-pivotal-softwares-ipo
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Quarter-Fiscal-Year-2019-Financial
Choudhury, S. R., (2017). Ford, Microsoft, and Dell EMC-backed start-up Pivotal could IPO
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Pivotal Software, (2019a). Delivering exceptional user experiences. Retrieved from:
https://pivotal.io/about
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