It’s a pivotal moment for VMware Inc., which announced the acquisition of security company Carbon Black and cloud application platform Pivotal Software Aug. 22.
The acquisition of Carbon Black, worth $2.1 billion, combined with the $2.7 billion purchase of Pivotal, address major priorities for the company, according to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger: building modern, enterprise-grade applications and protecting enterprise workloads.
“With these actions, we meaningfully accelerate our subscription and SaaS offerings and expand our ability to enable our customers’ digital transformation,” he said in a press release.
Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry platform, which recently added support for Kubernetes, also drew significant interest from VMware. The company has been bolstering its own Kubernetes offerings in recent months, the latest release being VMware Essential PKS in February.
The container orchestration software is still one of the hottest items on the market today – in 2018, only 17 per cent of IT teams were driving container adoption, according to one study. A year later, that number jumped to 35 per cent. Carbon Black will no doubt play an important role in ensuring that orchestration is done securely.
The two purchases follow the company’s acquisition of Bitnami in May, making VMware, traditionally a vendor focused primarily on providing infrastructure, one of the more compelling options for enterprise customers looking to build, run, manage, connect, and protect any app on any cloud or device.
“This type of bold move is exactly what the IT and security industries have been looking to see for a very long time,” said Patrick Morley, CEO, Carbon Black.
You can read more about the acquisition here.