VMware Folds Pivotal Into New Modern App Biz Unit

VMware closed on its $2.7 billion purchase of Pivotal, folding those operations into a new business unit headed by a long-time VMware executive. The move also sets VMware up to take advantage of its newly acquired Kubernetes assets heading into 2020. VMware closed on its $2.7 billion purchase of Pivotal, folding those operations into a new business unit headed by a long-time VMware executive. The move also sets VMware up to take advantage of its newly acquired Kubernetes assets heading into 2020. Pivotal’s operations have been combined with VMware’s Cloud Native Applications team under the newly formed Modern Applications Platform business unit. Ray O’Farrell will lead that unit as EVP and GM. O’Farrell previously served as EVP and executive sponsor of VMware’s Cloud Native Applications business, and prior to that was EVP and CTO. He has been at VMware since 2003. VMware is integrating Pivotal’s container focus into its broader push around containers, Kubernetes, and cloud native. This includes Pivotal’s Container Service (PKS), which is its hosted Kubernetes offering. Most of that focus will go into VMware’s Kubernetes-focused Tanzu portfolio that it unveiled earlier this year. Tanzu is VMware’s overarching Kubernetes play that includes the Pivotal assets and will be home to its Project Pacific that embeds Kubernetes natively into VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform. Tanzu also includes assets VMware acquired as part of its $550 million purchase of Kubernetes-focused startup Heptio and Bitnami, which it bought for an undisclosed amount. O’Farrell explained in a blog post that these assets will allow VMware to better support customers as they move their applications into various cloud environments. “Pivotal fundamentally strengthens our ability to deliver these solutions to our customers,” he wrote. “Pivotal has the history and know-how of transforming the way some of the world’s largest companies build and run their most important applications.” Rachel Stephens, an analyst at Redmonk, noted in a blog post at the time of the Pivotal deal that it made strategic sense for both companies. “Together, both companies have an improved ability to attack the market and become more direct competitors not only to Kubernetes platform offerings (like OpenShift from IBM/Red Hat) but the major cloud providers who are attempting to attack the same market via offerings such as Anthos or Fargate,” she wrote. However, Stephens added that integration execution was paramount. “As with all acquisitions, however, what looks good on paper is less important than on post-transaction execution – particularly with VMware already in the process of integrating multiple adjacent pieces,” she noted. “It will be important, therefore, to watch for signs of how smoothly the one time spinoff is reintegrated into the parent.” VMware COO Sanjay Poonen told attendees at a recent investor conference that the company’s Kubernetes plans will quickly surpass that of rival Red Hat thanks to its already established base of vSphere customers. He said VMware is focused on getting its current base of “hundreds of thousands” of vSphere customers to bite on its Kubernetes efforts, with a goal to get “tens of thousands of customers over the next several years” to adopt its container technology running on top of its vSphere virtualization platform base. Poonen explained that those products – combined with VMware’s vSphere and NSX networking platform – are what differentiate it in the market. “That’s a weakness for some of the other players who don’t have the strongest software-defined networking,” Poonen said. “Our ability to integrate into vSphere provides the ability for us to take Kubernetes — integrate it in vSphere — harder for someone who doesn’t have a strong base of 70 million odd virtual machines.”