When I started 2 yrs ago at my current bank, we had just made the decision to use Pivotal. I was brought on to help transition them to the cloud and to micro-service agile architecture. We actually won the award for 2017 as the best digital bank in the world, due to this transition and the mobile first apps we developed as part of it.
From the point of Pivotal use, we are currently using Pivotal and the cloud for 10 (5 in NA, 2 in Europe, 3 in Asia) of our over 1000 public facing global applications. We are just now examining public cloud - in fact I recently presented our business case for transitioning some apps to public cloud.
You can reasonably expect that in the next 5 years we’ll transition a majority of our customer facing applications to the cloud, and perhaps start moving some of them to the public cloud. All of our new applications and the things coming out of our Innovation Lab are going to Pivotal (and most to Mongo) by default, unless there are reasons not to.
Prior to this, I worked as a consultant to another huge US bank that had made the strategic move to relocate a lot of their apps out of their data centres to the Amazon cloud. They ran into trouble in the port and brought me in to help. I finished that engagement, but keep in touch with the Managing Director who brought me on. They are now considering moving away from a direct Amazon process to a Pivotal architecture to avoid vendor lock-in.
I also previously worked at one of the top automotive company in the world. Manufacturers are usually slow to move to the latest IT, but car companies are an exception because of the amount of new technology going into the “Connected Vehicle” initiative and self-driving cars. They are moving to Pivotal for their thousands of global apps, not only in the offices, but especially for all the applications running in the cars.
Just three examples I’ve personally seen of the amount of Pivotal growth to look forward to, not only in the financial sector.
To answer your other question, I think the Pivotal opportunity is primarily in large companies. Startups and small companies don’t have time to worry about vendor neutrality. They already have common processes because they only have a single IT group. They’ll just choose a cloud vendor or container, and get working to satisfy their customers’ needs.
You need companies with a complex IT group, with pressures from different groups to use different tools, competing against pressures from enterprise architecture, security, compliance, to simplify IT processes and reduce costs to get the maximum value from Pivotal.
Now when I say large companies, it really means practically any company traded on a major public exchange - what I’m really excluding is Ma and Pa shops and one-product companies. A simple test - if the company is large enough to need an enterprise architecture group, it is a very likely candidate for Pivotal.
