All things cloud are sure to be major topics next week in the VMworld user conference, but VMware took things up a notch with plans to invest $4.2 billion to acquire cloud-development company Pivotal, and safety provider Carbon Black.
Throughout its quarterly fiscal call VMware said it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its own Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology and yet another $2.1 billion for Carbon Black, that includes its Predictive Security Cloud offering along with other endpoint-security applications.
VMware had profound connections with both companies. Carbon Black technology is part of why VMware’s AppDefense end point security product. Pivotal includes a deeper connection in that VMware and Dell, VMware’s parent firm spun out Pivotal at 2013.
“These acquisitions address two crucial technology priorities of all businesses today — building modern, enterprise-grade protecting and applications enterprise workloads and customers. With these actions we meaningfully quicken our subscription and SaaS offerings and expand our capacity to empower our customers’ digital transformation,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger on the telephone.
With regards to this Pivotal acquisition Gelsinger said the time was right to own the whole compute stack. “We are now uniquely positioned to assist customers build, run and manage their cloud environment and customers can go 1 place to find all this technology,” Gelsinger said. “We embed the technology within our center VMware platform, and we will explain more about that at VMworld next week”
About the Carbon Black purchase, Gelsinger said that he expects the technology to be incorporated across VMware’s families including NSX networking applications and vSphere, the company’s flagship virtualization platform. “Safety is broken and fundamentally, customers want a different response in the security space. We think this movement will be an chance for major disruption.”
Patric Morley, president and CEO of Carbon Black wrote of the deal:”VMware has a vision to create a modern security system for any app, running on almost any cloud, delivered to any device — essentially, to build security into the fabric of the calculate heap. Carbon Black’s cloud-native platformour ability to view and stop attackers by leveraging the power of our abundant behavioral and data analytics, and our profound cybersecurity expertise are truly identifying”
VMware continues to be on a massive buying spree this season that has included:
Avi Networks for multi-cloud program delivery services.
Bitfusion for hardware virtualization.
Uhana, a business that is employing deep real-time and learning AI in company networks and software, to automate network operations and optimize application expertise.
Veriflow, for network verification, troubleshooting and assurance.
Heptio because of its Kubernetes technology.
Kubernetes integration is going to be a big topic at VMworld, Gelsinger hinted. “You will hear quite particular statements about how Heptio will be used.”
Other updates about where VMware vSphere and NSX-T are headed are also hot topics.
Introduced in 2017, NSX-T Data Center applications is targeted at organizations looking to encourage multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads, hypervisor environments and the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds. In February that the company anointed NSX-T since the company’s go-to platform for prospective software-defined cloud developments.
VMware is battling Cisco with its Application Centric Infrastructure, Juniper using its Contrail system and many others like Pluribus, Arista and Big Switch, and the way NSX-T evolves will be key to that competition.
The latest news about vSphere was that VMware customers are now able to migrate non-vSphere, as well as increased amounts of on-premises program workloads, to a variety of cloud solutions using a new release of their company’s Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) application-mobility computer software. Introduced in 2017, VMware HCX allows vSphere clients tie together on-premises systems and applications with a number of cloud services.
The HCX statement was a part of VMware’s continuing evolution to cloud technologies. In July the firm teamed with Google to natively support VMware workloads in its own Google Cloud service, providing customers more choices for deploying business applications.
Further news about that relationship is likely at VMworld too.
VMware also includes a hybrid partnership with Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. This package, known as Azure VMware Solutions, that can be built on VMware Cloud Foundation, a bundle of the organization’s conventional compute-virtualization software vSphere with NSX network virtualization and VSAN software-defined storage area network product. The company is expected to update developments with this particular stage too.
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