VMware today announced that it is acquiring Carbon Black, a publicly traded security company that focuses on securing modern cloud-native workloads. The price of the acquisition is about $2.1 billion.
In addition, VMware also confirmed the acquisition of Pivotal, which will have a value of about $2.7 billion. VMware’s revenue for the last quarter was $2.44 billion. That’s a big day for VMware.
“Building on another solid quarter, we are thrilled about announcing our intent to acquire Pivotal and Carbon Black,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in today’s announcement. “These acquisitions address two critical technology VMware, Inc. priorities of all businesses today — building modern, enterprise-grade applications and protecting enterprise workloads and clients. With these actions we meaningfully accelerate our subscription and SaaS offerings and expand our ability to enable our customers’ digital transformation.”
Indeed, these are two very different companies, but both Carbon Black and Pivotal focus on modern workloads. Pivotal focuses on building modern applications, thanks to its Cloud Foundry heritage and recently added support for Kubernetes, while Carbon Black provides the security features necessary to secure modern applications and infrastructures.
The two moves follow the company’s acquisition of Bitnami earlier this year, completing this triquetra of acquisitions that all aim to bring VMware’s technology into a future where VMs are only part of the equation.
Carbon Black was founded in 2002 and went public in early 2018. At the time of the IPO, its valuation was about $1.25 billion. Its stock traded as low as less than $13 earlier this year, but it has since recovered to over $21. VMware will pay $26 per share in cash for the company and expects the deal to close by the end of January 2020.
“Today marks an exciting milestone for Carbon Black, VMware and the entire cybersecurity industry,” said Patrick Morley, CEO, Carbon Black, in the announcement. “We now have the opportunity to seamlessly integrate Carbon Black’s cloud-native endpoint protection platform into all of VMware’s control points. This type of bold move is exactly what the IT and security industries have been looking to see for a very long time. We look forward to working with the VMware team to continue delivering a modern security cloud platform to customers around the world. Additionally, we’re pleased that today’s transaction provides Carbon Black’s shareholders with immediate and substantial value.”
The acquisition of Pivotal, which was originally incubated at VMware and EMC Corporation, brings a new developer platform into VMware that makes it easier for developers to write, test and deploy their applications. It’s a smart move that helps VMware complete its story, which has typically focused on providing infrastructure over actual development tools.
“Kubernetes is emerging as the de facto standard for multi-cloud modern apps. We are excited to combine Pivotal’s development platform, tools and services with VMware’s infrastructure capabilities to deliver a comprehensive Kubernetes portfolio to build, run and manage modern applications,” said Gelsinger. “Importantly, adding Pivotal to our platform accelerates our broader Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device vision and reinforces our leadership position in modern multi-cloud IT infrastructure.”
You can read more about the Pivotal acquisition here.
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