The speculation here is certainly understandable. The reality, though, is that Pivotal's consulting business is growing stronger than ever - we're over 100 great Rails developers now, with offices in SF, NYC, Boulder, and Singapore, and we are completely booked. All of our business comes from word of mouth - mostly existing and past clients. Check out some of them here: http://pivotallabs.com/clients.
Many clients do come back to us, but we actually try hard so that they don't ever "have" to - by leaving them with a maintainable, tested codebase, and effective engineering practices like TDD/BDD, pairing, aggressive refactoring, etc. We even help hire and train their own developers.
We kept Tracker free for almost three years, and over 180,000 people have signed up for it so far. We use it on all our projects, and the widespread adoption has been a great calling card for our consulting business. The decision to begin charging for it was not an easy one, but the reason is simple - we want to make Tracker better, faster, and establishing a revenue model for Tracker will allow us to devote more resources to it, including a larger dev team, support staff, and operational/hardware capacity.
Our goals are not to transition from a consulting company to a product one, but to do both equally well, and it's hard to do that when one side of the business has to fund/support the other.
Integration with JIRA is a built-in feature (not community contributed), along with Zendesk, Bugzilla, Lighthouse, and Get Satisfaction integration. More are coming, but these tend to be the mostly costly to support.
And the idea with these integrations is that your team can do focused collaboration (with Tracker) on some subset of issues/bugs that are stored in a larger, more widely used tracking system at your company (eg JIRA).
The recent redesign of the outer pages and the layout was the first phase of a big UX overhaul - viewing/editing of individual stories is next. Working on design for this now, we plan to dive in to implementation in the next few weeks.
Many clients do come back to us, but we actually try hard so that they don't ever "have" to - by leaving them with a maintainable, tested codebase, and effective engineering practices like TDD/BDD, pairing, aggressive refactoring, etc. We even help hire and train their own developers.
We kept Tracker free for almost three years, and over 180,000 people have signed up for it so far. We use it on all our projects, and the widespread adoption has been a great calling card for our consulting business. The decision to begin charging for it was not an easy one, but the reason is simple - we want to make Tracker better, faster, and establishing a revenue model for Tracker will allow us to devote more resources to it, including a larger dev team, support staff, and operational/hardware capacity.
Our goals are not to transition from a consulting company to a product one, but to do both equally well, and it's hard to do that when one side of the business has to fund/support the other.