VMWare goes on $4.8bn cloud spending spree

VMWare has doubled down on the cloud, is forking out a total of $4.8 billion in cash and shares to acquire security firm Carbon Black and software development firm Pivotal.

Founded in 2007, Carbon Black currently offers cloud security solutions to 5,600 customers and 500 partners globally. The cloud-native security platform leverages big data and behavioural analytics to provide endpoint protection against a growing variety and increasing velocity of cyber threats.

“The security industry is broken and ineffective with too many fragmented solutions and no cohesive platform architecture,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMWare. “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.”

“We now have the opportunity to seamlessly integrate Carbon Black’s cloud-native endpoint protection platform into all of VMware’s control points,” said Patrick Morley, CEO of Carbon Black. “This type of bold move is exactly what the IT and security industries have been looking to see for a very long time.”

With Carbon Black’s portfolio added to the fray, VMWare has said it can now create a modern security cloud platform for any application, running on any cloud, on any device. The aim is to add more intelligence to security functions, threat detection, as well as accelerating responses to limit the damage which can be inflicted.

This is the challenge which many enterprise organizations are facing around the world; the volume of threats is increasing, but the complexity is becoming an even greater headache. With security team limited, and due to a skills shortage, it looks likely to stay this way, many organizations are turning to artificial intelligence to shore up defences.

For Carbon Black, this could prove to be a very useful move. Although the footprint of the business is already impressive, leaning on the significant presence of the Dell Technologies family, the parent company of VMWare, could certainly open doors to new customers.

After years of neglect, it seems the security segments of the digital economy might finally get the attention deserved.

Heading over to the Pivotal acquisition, VMWare will have to part with $2.7 billion to bring this firm into the family.

“Kubernetes is emerging as the de facto standard for multi-cloud modern apps,” said Gelsinger. “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.”

Pivotal will add to the ‘Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device’ strategy being set in place by VMWare. Following the acquisition of Heptio last year, VMWare has become one of the top three contributors to Kubernetes, the open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. With Pivotal in the stable, another leader in the Kubernetes ecosystem, the momentum will only head one direction.