Maybe I'm miss remembering
But wasn't Pivotal originally owned and spun out of VMWare some years back? (Or that might have been Spring)
Dell-owned VMware is in talks to acquire Dell-owned Pivotal Software, the hypervisor giant announced Wednesday. In a filing to America's financial watchdog, the SEC, the boards of directors of VMware and Pivotal said they "are proceeding to negotiate definitive agreements with respect to a transaction to acquire all of the …
Pivotal was formed from assets from EMC and VMware.
Spring, CloudFoundry, Gemfire (VMware vFabric GemFire) came from VMware
Greenplum was from EMC as was Pivotal Labs. They had their own Hadoop distro as well before converting to Hortonworks.
Paul Maritz acted as head of strategy for Joe Tucci (EMC) to form the plan and identify the assets to form Pivotal.
I was quite involved with them at their launch...