It looks as if Pivotal isn't going public right away. The EMC and VMware spinoff is raising a $253 million Series C, with Ford Motor Co. as a lead investor and Microsoft joining as well.

The funding, announced today, includes prior investor GE, which first invested in 2013, and EMC and VMware. The deal is expected to close this month.

Pivotal is best known for its open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Cloud Foundry. It's a platform that makes it easier for software developers to do their work in the cloud, so it fits into the whole DevOps trend and the concept of agile development.

Major corporations are starting to believe that software development is crucial to their futures — meaning, they also need to get on board with "agile" and DevOps. You can see that in GE's investment and Ford's three-year collaboration, which was announced in December.

Cloud Foundry can be used on any cloud — hence, Microsoft's interest. The company sees Cloud Foundry as being an ideal home for Java applications on Azure.

EMC has been open about wanting to take Pivotal public. A chunk of IPO cash would seem a good way to defray some of the debt that Dell is accruing in the pending acquisition of EMC.

Pivotal is growing at a rapid clip. First-quarter revenues were $83 million, up 56 percent from the same quarter a year ago, and the company now employs 2,000 across 17 locations.

In addition to the cloud stuff, Pivotal offers big data software, some of which is available in open source form.