Pivotal started life in 1990 as Pen Magic Software, a British Columbia company betting on computers you wrote on with a stylus. Pen computing fizzled. By 1995 the company had renamed itself Pivotal Software and turned to customer relationship software, a tool for tracking every contact a business had with its buyers. When it went public in August 1999, Pivotal had licensed its applications to over 540 customers from its home in North Vancouver.

Pen Magic Changes Course

Co-founders Norman Francis and Keith Wales led the company through its turn. Pivotal aimed at mid-sized businesses, below the giant corporations that bought from Siebel. It sold through a network of more than 95 partners that installed and serviced its products. In 1998 it co-founded the Enterprise 360 group with KPMG, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. The bet was that CRM would spread from the largest corporations down to everyone else.

A Bidding War at the End

Pivotal priced at $12 a share in August 1999 and listed on Nasdaq as PVTL. The dot-com crash hit its customers, and the stock fell. In 2003 Pivotal agreed to sell itself to investor Oak Investment Partners. Rival Onyx Software then made its own offer, and CDC Software, a unit of chinadotcom, topped both. CDC closed the purchase in February 2004 for about $59 million.

Cover: The Windmill, from Old English Masters, Timothy Cole. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a windmill (turning on a pivot).