It’s one thing to iterate on a product and call it innovation. But building a product — and market — from scratch is a whole ‘nother story.
When Pivot3 launched in 2003, the company brought to life a new market in the IT infrastructure and storage space, building its own technology from the ground up and securing 25 patents along the way.
We connected with CTO Bill Galloway to learn more about Pivot3’s technology stack and how it continues to color the now-seasoned company’s culture.
What’s behind Pivot3’s tech stack?
Pivot3’s technology stack is a combination of hardware, proprietary software and software by partners like VMware. Inside our software, there’s some amount of open source, which is based on a very trimmed down Linux distribution, plus more than 25 of Pivot3’s IT patents.
How did you decide what tech to use and what not to use?
We focus the majority of our efforts on industry-leading software IP to provide features to other components like hardware. When looking at the three major pieces within our technology stack, Pivot3 can significantly add value with its advanced software, but recognizes that other components, like virtualization, are already well understood within the industry. For this reason, we choose to partner with companies like VMware to enhance our overall stack by combining the top solutions on the market.
By utilizing this model, we can deploy our software IP on a variety of different hardware options, ranging in performance. Pivot3 has some extremely high-end data center applications where the software is running on high-performance hardware in addition to the complete opposite where we deploy our software on extremely cost-effective hardware. Both are great options, allowing Pivot3 to meet a variety of customer’s unique needs.
How does your technology stack affect the company’s culture?
All of the original founders of Pivot3 have been working in enterprise storage and software for the majority of our careers. At the time, there weren’t any ‘off-the-shelf’ pieces of what is today known as software defined storage. We wrote all of this software from scratch to solve a very specific need by developing unique algorithms, which literally didn’t exist prior. As product and market requirements have changed, the core IP we developed back when we founded the company is still in the heart of what we’re doing.
Just like our technology, Pivot3’s company culture is still rooted in the ideologies in which we were founded. Comparing it to our technology stack, we have combined some of the most intelligent people in the technology industry into one company to create an unprecedented work environment.
When hiring, do you look for candidates who are proficient in the technology your company uses or are you more concerned with other aspects of their qualifications?
Pivot3 is a group of extremely intelligent individuals who come from a variety of backgrounds. Many of the people we hire are domain experts, since storage software is a very specialized solution and is the basis of our business. Yet problems we face in this ever-changing industry are diverse. We don’t want a monoculture of everyone thinking and behaving the same way. At Pivot3, we hire forward-thinkers who thrive in a fast-paced environment to help bring our solutions and future offerings to the next level.
