VMware is closing the year with a significant new component in its arsenal. Today it announced it has closed the $2.7 billion
Pivotal acquisition it originally
announced in August.
The acquisition gives
VMware another component in its march to transform from a pure virtual machine company into a cloud native vendor that can manage infrastructure wherever it lives. It fits alongside other recent deals like buying
Heptio and
Bitnami, two other deals that closed this year.
They hope this all fits neatly
into VMware Tanzu, which is designed to bring Kubernetes containers and VMware virtual machines together in a single management platform.
“VMware Tanzu is built upon our recognized infrastructure products and further expanded with the technologies that
Pivotal, Heptio, Bitnami and many other VMware teams bring to this new portfolio of products and services,” Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager of the Modern Application Platforms Business Unit at VMware, wrote
in a blog post announcing the deal had closed.
Craig McLuckie, who came over in the Heptio deal, and is now VP of R&D at VMware, told TechCrunch in November at KubeCon, that while the deal hadn’t closed at that point, he saw a future where Pivotal could help at a professional services level, as well.
“In the future when Pivotal is a part of this story, they won’t be just delivering technology, but also deep expertise to support application transformation initiatives,” he said.
Up until the closing, the company had been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but as of today Pivotal becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of VMware. It’s important to note that this transaction didn’t happen in a vacuum where two random companies came together.
In fact, VMware and Pivotal were part of the consortium of companies that
Dell purchased when
it acquired EMC in 2015 for $67 billion. While both were part of
EMC and then Dell, each one operated separately and independently. At the time of the sale to Dell, Pivotal was considered a key piece, one that could stand strongly on its own.
Pivotal CEO talks IPO and balancing life in Dell family of companies
