The auto company announced the investment in the three-year-old EMC spin-out, adding that its chief information officer, Marcy Klevorn, is also joining Pivotal’s board.
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For example, Pivotal can help Ford speed up its software-development times, he said in an interview.
One of the major new investors this go round was Ford Motor Company in conjunction with Microsoft. It has worked reasonably well in helping large organizations at least begin transforming into digitally-driven companies to this point, but what’s not clear is how this will translate as the company grows and has to make this process work for an increasingly large customer base.
The growing number of tie-ups between the automakers and the tech companies underscores a rapid pace of collaboration as the two industries jointly develop autonomous vehicles, more advanced in-car entertainment and mobility services. “This investment will accelerate our global reach to bring our unique software development methodology and modern cloud platform and analytics tools to every forward-thinking CEO”, said Rob Mee, Pivotal CEO. Pivotal plans to set up several joint development labs where Ford and Pivotal software engineers can work together and learn. And Microsoft counts Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry as a popular service.
Ford recently teamed up with Pivotal to deliver FordPass, an innovative consumer experience platform that launched last month.
Existing Pivotal investors General Electric Co (GE.N), EMC Corp (EMC.N) and VMWare Inc (VMW.N) are participating in the funding round, which gives Pivotal a valuation of $2.8 billion after the new cash infusion, a person familiar with the funding round said.
Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry has been the company’s primary subscription business.
“Our priority is ensuring that Microsoft Azure is the best place to run Java applications using Pivotal Cloud Foundry”, said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise Division.
Microsoft hopes to strengthen its Azure cloud computing platform even more in this latest investment round for Pivotal. “Today’s announcement is a reflection of this commitment, along with our continued emphasis on choice and flexibility across our cloud platform”.
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Ford isn’t the first auto company to tap Pivotal in an effort to refine its software capabilities. Pivotal spun out of EMC and VMware in 2013, taking software assets from both companies.
