Joining the parade of new initial public offerings of stock, Pivotal Software Inc. today filed papers to go public.

The move appears to be a way that Dell Technologies Inc., the majority owner of the maker of software for building cloud computing applications, can make further strides to reduce massive debt incurred from its 2016 acquisition of EMC Corp. “This is about Dell continuing to de-lever so they can pay down the debt,” said longtime analyst and SiliconANGLE Media Inc. co-Chief Executive Dave Vellante.

Pivotal said it plans to raise $100 million in the IPO, though that’s a common placeholder. Given Pivotal’s last private valuation of $2.8 billion, the amount raised seems likely to go higher.

The San Francisco-based company would join a growing number of technology companies testing the IPO waters. Today, Dropbox Inc. went public in a $756 million offering that saw its shares rise 40 percent above a range already raised in previous days. Spotify AB is scheduled to go public in early April, and there are a number of enterprise software and cloud services companies looking to go out as well.

The S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Pivotal remains unprofitable, losing $163 million in its last fiscal year ended Feb. 2, though that’s down from a $232 million net loss the year before, and its gross margins rose from 44 to 55 percent in its last fiscal year. Revenue rose 22 percent, to $509.4 million.

Subscription revenue in particular has been strong, a positive sign since it’s more regular and predictable than traditional software and services. Subscription sales jumped 73 percent, to $259 million in the most recent fiscal year, according to the filing, as the number of subscription customers rose from 275 to 319.

Still, the latest figure is still only a little over half of overall revenues. Moreover, since Pivotal has products tied into other companies in the Dell family, such as its Pivotal Container Service with VMware, it’s uncertain how independent a company it can be.

The company has taken a circuitous route to an IPO. It was founded by Rob Mee (pictured, right, with Dell Chief Executive Michael Dell) in 1989 as a software consultant. In 2012, it was acquired by storage giant EMC, which then spun it out and put former Microsoft Corp. executive and then-VMware Inc. CEO Paul Maritz at the helm. Maritz moved over to chairman in 2015, and Mee took over the CEO spot again. When Dell bought EMC, the former became the majority owner in Pivotal.

Dell itself has been looking at further ways to pay down its $50 billion in debt, the most recent being a potential plan to take VMware public that was revealed in January. A separate plan to take Pivotal public was hinted at the time, and Bloomberg said sources valued Pivotal at $5 billion to $7 billion.

So the filing doesn’t come as a surprise, especially since Pivotal is a leader in the amorphous segment of cloud computing called platform as a service. As one of the most-adopted PaaS companies, said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., Pivotal “should be a public company.”

Photo: Pivotal