VMware acquires Pivotal and Carbon Black to boost its cloud offerings
Two deals are valued together at $4.8 billion and come just days after VMware acquired Intrinsic for an undisclosed sum
VMware has opened the corporate wallet again, acquiring Pivotal and Carbon Black in two separate deals valued together at $4.8 billion.
According to VMware, the Pivotal acquisition will have a value of about $2.7 billion, while cyber security firm Carbon Black will be bought in an all-cash transaction for $2.1 billion.
VMware expects both deals to close in the second half of its fiscal year 2020, which ends 31st January, 2020.
"These acquisitions address two critical technology priorities of all businesses today — building modern, enterprise-grade applications and protecting enterprise workloads and clients," said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.
He added that the deals would help the company to "meaningfully accelerate our subscription and SaaS [software-as-a-service] offerings and expand our ability to enable our customers' digital transformation".
Pivotal is known for offering tools and services for software developers working on cloud services. It is also a leading contributor to the Spring developer framework, which gets more than 75 million downloads in a month.
Recently, the firm rolled out Pivotal Spring Runtime for Kubernetes and will launch Pivotal Application Service for Kubernetes in the coming months.
In the past one year, VMware has shown much interest in Kubernetes-related investments. In November 2018, it acquired Heptio, a startup that provided professional services for enterprises either adopting or already using Kubernetes.
By integrating Pivotal's platform, service and tools with its own infrastructure, VMware can expect to offer its clients a wide-ranging Kubernetes portfolio and enable them to build and manage applications.
Both VMware and Pivotal are majority owned by Dell Technologies. VMware was picked-up when Dell acquired storage hardware maker EMC for $67 billion in 2015. EMC had acquired VMware for $625 million in cash in 2004.
Carbon Black, meanwhile, is a leader in cloud-native endpoint protection. It offers a cloud security platform that uses behavioural and big data analytics to provide protection against cyber attacks.
The company has more than 500 partners and about 5,600 customers worldwide.
According to Gelsinger, Carbon Black's acquisition is a "huge step forward" in providing customers with an "enterprise-grade platform to administer and protect workloads, applications and networks".
He believes Carbon Black's solutions, combined with VMware's security offerings - including Workspace ONE, AppDefense, SecureState and NSX - will be able to create a cutting-edge security cloud platform for any application, running on any cloud.
In both acquisitions, JP Morgan was VMware's financial advisor.
Just two days back, VMware had announced that it was acquiring security startup Intrinsic as part of its refocus on public cloud.
Last year, the company rolled out its AWS-based cloud platform to customers across Europe and said that it was looking to "accelerate and simplify enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud deployments".