Is it pivotal for your business to own a .com domain?

Is it pivotal for your business to own a .com domain? That’s the question of the hour today.

Pivotal, a software and services company that provides agile development services on an open source platform.Today’s title plays on a massive $254 million Series C investment with a whopping $2.8 billion valuation recently awarded to Pivotal, a software and services company that provides agile development services on an open source platform.

As reported by TechCrunch, Pivotal has swooned the wallets of Ford, Microsoft, EMC, VMware and GE for a quite a hefty investment.

When I see eye-popping investments as the Pivotal investment, I always wonder what will the company, especially a software development company, that’s not operating it’s digital presence on a .com do with such funding.

There’s much talk around using the newly minted funding for expanding existing products, hiring more engineers and developers, moving into foreign markets, or simply scaling this digitally driven company using transformative automation.

Notice anything about Pivotal’s services and their use the .com extension (see below)?

  • https://www.pivotaltracker.com/
  • https://run.pivotal.io
  • https://network.pivotal.io/products/pivotal-cf
  • https://pivotal.io/platform

Exactly, most use the .io either as a subdirectory or subdomain, while it’s agile project management tracker service is the only .com extension I’ve found to date.

pivotal-cloud-foundrypivotal-labspivotaltracker

This makes me wonder. Will Pivotal attempt to use a portion of the investment for domain purposes? Who knows.

I mean, is it pivotal for Pivotal to own the .com domain instead of its .io domain?

In my opinion, it’s not likely that Pivotal will look to invest in moving from Pivotal.io and Pivotal.com.  Not every company that reaches the success that Pivotal has attained needs to use or own a .com domain for their business.

After all, tech companies ripe for the next IPO are the coolest when they launch using an .io domain, right?

Well, only time will tell if that is the case for Pivotal.

Even if Pivotal wanted to purchase Pivotal.com, they would have to silently attempt to negotiate the redirected .com domain away from Aptean.com, a mission-critical enterprise software solutions company specializing in CRM, ERP and SCM solutions.

With Pivotal in the news and just about coverage on every tech website known to mankind, whether knowingly or unknowingly, I wonder how much traffic leakage they’re losing from people typing in Pivotal.com?  Remember O.co snafu?

One could argue that owning the .com domain isn’t as pivotal for Pivotal due to the fact of their recent securing of Series C investment.

I mean, what more could a company like Pivotal gain from owning the .com domain?

Or maybe a better question to ask is what more could a company like Pivotal stand to LOSE NOT owning .com domain?

P.S. Pivotal.net is available for purchase via auction.

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Written by Alvin Brown
He's an experienced and passionate serial entrepreneur, founder and publisher of Kickstart Commerce. Alvin possesses a great love for startups dominating their market using profitable digital strategies for greater commerce.