VMware agreed to acquire Pivotal Software at a valuation of $2.7 billion.
Pivotal supplies a developer-centric platform, tools and services that accelerate modern app development. Pivotal is also a major contributor to the Spring developer framework, which sees more than 75 million downloads per month. The company is fully embracing Kubernetes with the recent launch of Pivotal Spring Runtime for Kubernetes and the upcoming Pivotal Application Service for Kubernetes. Pivotal was founded in 2013 and completed its IPO in 2018.
VMware and Pivotal noted their shared history of collaboration and joint innovation, reflected in the co-development and launch of VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) in February of 2018. VMware has increased its Kubernetes-related investments over the past year with the acquisition of Heptio, and the Kubernetes founders, to become one of the top three contributors to Kubernetes.
“The time is ideal to join forces with VMware, an industry leader who shares our commitment to open source community contributions and our focus on adding developer value on top of Kubernetes,” said Rob Mee, CEO, Pivotal. “VMware has a proven track record of helping organizations run and manage consistent infrastructure in support of mission critical applications, and our two companies have already built a strong foundation on our successful VMware PKS collaboration. We look forward to continuing our work with VMware to provide even more value to customers building modern applications.”
“Kubernetes is emerging as the de facto standard for multi-cloud modern apps. 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,” said Pat Gelsinger , CEO of VMware. “Importantly, adding Pivotal to our platform, accelerates our broader Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device vision and reinforces our leadership position in modern multi-cloud IT infrastructure.”
