VMware snaps up Pivotal and Carbon Black for $4.8 billion

The Pivotal deal was brokered by Dell Technologies

VMware has announced it has bought software companies Pivotal and Carbon Black in two deals valued at $4.8 billion as it seeks to broaden its enterprise services portfolio.

Dell Technologies brokered the VMware deal, news of which surfaced late last week. Dell owns majority stakes in both VMware and Pivotal, and Pivotal was born out of Dell EMC (then EMC Corp.) and VMware in 2012, so Dell is effectively acquiring a company it produced and indirectly owns.

Pivotal is best known for commercialising the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. Pivotal Cloud Foundry or PCF is a subscription-based software that helps developers and IT departments build, deploy and operate cloud-based apps. In other words, a cloud-based tool that lets organisations build cloud applications. The company also offers consulting services.

While Pivotal has previously boasted that the majority of Fortune 500 companies use its services, including American and Southwest and Boeing, the company has laboured since its IPO in April 2018 and reported $31.7 million losses in its last financial quarter.

Pat Gelsinger, CEO at VMware, said the acquisition will enable the company to deliver a comprehensive Kubernetes portfolio for building, running and managing applications fit for the multicloud era.

“Adding Pivotal to our platform, accelerates our broader Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device vision and reinforces our leadership position in modern multicloud IT infrastructure,” he said.

VMware also announced it is to acquire Carbon Black for $2.1 billion. The Massachusetts-based security provider’s main product is a cloud security platform that leverages big data and behaviour analytics to prevent cyber attacks. According to Gartner, spending on cloud security is projected to exceed $900 million by 2021.

“The security industry is broken and ineffective with too many fragmented solutions and no cohesive platform architecture. By bringing Carbon Black into the VMware family, we are now taking a huge step forward in security and delivering an enterprise-grade platform to administer and protect workloads, applications and networks,” said Gelsinger.

“With this acquisition, VMware will also take a significant leadership position in security for the new age of modern applications delivered from any cloud to any device.”

After the announcement, Pivotal shares rose 9 percent in extended trading, while those of Carbon Black were up nearly 6 percent. VMware shares fell 7 percent and Dell shares shed 3 percent.