VMware completes $2.7 billion acquisition of Pivotal

VMWare is closing the year in a really big way. Today, the tech giant announced it has closed $2.7 billion acquisition of Pivotal, a cloud software company that provides digital transformation technology and services. VMWare made the original announcement in August.

Now that the acquisition is completed, VMware is combining Pivotal’s offerings with VMware’s Cloud Native Applications offerings into a new group, the Modern Applications Platform Business Unit. The Pivotal’s R&D team members have joined up with VMware’s R&D teams. Together, we will deliver a comprehensive portfolio of products, tools, and services.

In an email to its customers, Pivotal said: “We have some exciting news to share: Pivotal is now part of VMware.” Pivotal’s offerings will be a key part of VMware Tanzu. VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services to help transform the way customers build, run, and manage software on Kubernetes. The combination of Pivotal’s developer capabilities with VMware’s Kubernetes run-time infrastructure and management will deliver a comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes solution for modern applications in any environment—data center, cloud, and at the edge.

Pivotal’s offerings will be core to the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services designed to help customers transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications, with Kubernetes as the common infrastructure substrate. The combination of Pivotal’s developer-centric offerings with VMware’s upstream Kubernetes run-time infrastructure and management tools will deliver a comprehensive enterprise solution that enables dramatic improvements in developer productivity in the creation of modern applications. VMware is able to offer product building blocks and integrated solutions that are tested and proven with technical expertise that customers need to accelerate software delivery across data center, cloud and edge environments.

“It’s my pleasure to announce Ray O’Farrell as the leader of VMware’s new Modern Applications Platform business unit—uniting the Pivotal and VMware Cloud Native Applications teams,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “And as Pivotal is now part of VMware, I want to thank the Pivotal leadership team for building a great company. Together, we’re poised to be the leading enabler of Kubernetes with a deep understanding of both operators and developers.”

“Digital transformation and the applications that drive it should not be restricted only to cloud and software giants,” said Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager, Modern Applications Platform Business Unit, VMware. “We believe that modern application development solutions and practices need to be easily accessible to everyday enterprises across the globe. With Pivotal’s developer capabilities as the foundation, we’ll focus on delivering consumable, enterprise-ready cloud native offerings to customers to help them achieve better business outcomes.”

“Pivotal has fundamentally changed how the world’s biggest brands build and manage software with a focus on developer productivity through platform abstractions and development techniques as well as connecting the business with the developer,” said Edward Hieatt, senior vice president, customer success, Pivotal. “The combination of Pivotal and VMware offers the most comprehensive application platform in the industry and is a win for our customers, a win for Pivotal, and a win for VMware. We’re excited to team up with VMware to help more enterprises become like modern software companies by adopting DevOps and Lean techniques developed by internet giants and the startup community.”

Founded in 2013 by Bill Cook, Paul Maritz, Rob Mee, and Scott Yara, Pivotal provides digital transformation technology and services. Its Cloud Native platform drives software innovation for many of the world’s most admired brands. With millions of developers in communities around the world, Pivotal technology touches billions of users every day. Its technology is used by Global 2000 companies to achieve strategic advantages in software development and IT operations.