VMware, Inc., an enterprise software provider, has completed the acquisition of Pivotal Software, Inc., a cloud-native platform provider. Pivotal will now operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of VMware. The transaction represented an enterprise value for Pivotal of approximately $2.7 billion.
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 is designed to deliver a comprehensive enterprise solution that improves 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.
“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.”
Edward Hieatt, senior vice president, customer success, Pivotal said the combination of Pivotal and VMware offers “the most comprehensive application platform in the industry” and will “help more enterprises become like modern software companies by adopting DevOps and Lean techniques developed by internet giants and the startup community.”
Mutual customers have also reacted positively to the news of the acquisition. “By working with both Pivotal and VMware, we’ve been able to completely transform how we write software for our military and government customers,” said Todd Probert, Vice President for C2, Space and Intelligence at Raytheon. “Combining these companies under a single umbrella is going to make it possible for my team to get code to our customers even faster and easier.”
Under the terms of the transaction, Pivotal’s Class A common stockholders are entitled to receive $15.00 per share cash for each share held (without interest and less applicable tax withholdings), and Pivotal’s Class B common stockholder, Dell Technologies, received approximately 7.2 million shares of VMware Class B common stock, at an exchange ratio of 0.0550 shares of VMware Class B common stock for each share of Pivotal Class B common stock.
