December 30, 2019 / By Alex Wang, Vice President, Corporate Development, VMware

Reflections on the Close of the Pivotal and Carbon Black Acquisitions

Before closing out 2019, I wanted to reflect upon the year’s M&A activities. VMware’s M&A strategy has always focused on enhancing the output of our world class R&D team with the right mix of inorganic technologies and talent as well as technology partnerships.

Today’s Pivotal close announcement (read the press release here ) marks the close of what’s been a productive year for the VMware corporate development team—including the “intent to acquire” announcements of both Carbon Black and Pivotal on a single day.

Pivotal and Carbon Black both address critical IT priorities for VMware—building apps with a modern approach and protecting enterprise workloads and clients, respectively. The two acquisitions bookend VMware’s strategy to deliver software solutions that enable customers to build, run, manage, connect and protect any app, on any cloud and any device.

We’ve always demonstrated our willingness and ability to execute a variety of complex transactions—large or small—to round out our product portfolio and talent. But we’ve also been thoughtful about our M&A approach, as in this case where both deals were considered over an extended period of time. Our engagement with Carbon Black went back as far as 2017; the conversations with Pivotal went back even further. But once we validated our strategy, we moved expeditiously and with conviction.

Now, we’ve hit the ground running with integration of Carbon Black and the establishment of the Security Business Unit. Next, we turn our attention to the successful integration of Pivotal into the new Modern Applications Platform Business Unit. I’m excited to see what follows in the new year as we continue our mission to help our customers successfully build, run and manage their modern applications on-prem, in the cloud and at the edge.