VMware continued its recent shopping spree with the purchases of cloud-application developer Pivotal and security vendor Carbon Black for a combined $4.8 billion.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the acquisitions bolster VMware’s “push to allow customers to build, manage and secure applications across devices and cloud-computing environments.”
Pivotal was formed from software development assets that VMware spun out into a separate company in 2013 after struggling to integrate them into its primary data center management software business. Carbon Black, which was founded in 2002 and went public in early 2018, makes the CB Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.
VMware agreed to pay a blended price of $11.71 a share for Pivotal and $26 a share for Carbon Black. The enterprise values of the deals are $2.7 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively.
“These companies address key strategic IT priorities — building apps with a modern approach and protecting enterprise workloads and clients,” VMware said in a news release.
“With Pivotal, VMware will be able to deliver an integrated modern apps portfolio combining Pivotal’s next-generation developer platform and VMware’s Kubernetes portfolio,” it added. “With Carbon Black, VMware will be able to provide a next generation security cloud with Carbon Black’s protection suite and VMware’s intrinsic security assets.”
VMware’s other acquisitions this year have included Avi Networks for multi-cloud application delivery services, Bitfusion for hardware virtualization, and Heptio for Kubernetes technology.
The company has been shifting from virtual machine (VM) software development to the Kubernetes open-source platform that was originally developed by Google.
“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,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said.
TechCrunch noted that Pivotal are “two very different companies” but both “focus on modern workloads. Pivotal focuses on building modern applications … while Carbon Black provides the security features necessary to secure modern applications and infrastructures.”