VMware Acquires Carbon Black for $2.1B and Pivotal for $2.7B

  • The whole Dell related ownership structure is just ... odd.

        Under the terms of the transaction, Pivotal's Class A common
        stockholders will receive $15.00 per share cash for each
        share held, and Pivotal's Class B common stockholder, Dell
        Technologies, will receive 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. This transaction, in
        aggregate, results in an expected net cash payout for VMware
        of $0.8 billion. The impact of equity issued to Dell
        Technologies would increase its ownership stake in VMware by
        approximately 0.34 percentage points to 81.09% based on the
        shares currently outstanding. VMware currently holds 15
        percent of fully-diluted outstanding shares of Pivotal. The
        transaction is expected to be funded through cash on the
        balance sheet, accessing short-term borrowing capacity, and
        approximately 7.2 million shares of VMware Class B common
        stock to Dell.

  • Isn't this more of a consolidation? My understanding was that Pivotal was spun out of EMC and included some assets that were formerly under VMWare. Also Dell Technologies owns a majority stake in both of them.

  • Checkout Carbon Black’s stock today before the announcement. It was way up, well before the news became public ....

  • I have never heard of Carbon black... While researching this I also found that VMWare acquired heptio for 550m !? Wow. Isn't pivotal a massive company? It's value is just 4 times that of a 2 year startup?

  • Maybe VMware should have used that money to develop their own kernel instead of violating Linux' GPL licensing.

    But it's probably cheaper still to buy that off with a juicy "Platinum Member" seat at the Linux Foundation.

  • I'm not surprised at the Pivotal acquisition. VMware is determined to succeed at Kubernetes. There is already a lot of integration with Pivotal's Kubernetes distribution both at a technical as well as a business level.

  • Uh, PVTL's market cap is $3.73B. Isn't that one hell of a discount? Wouldn't shareholders sue? Can someone explain this please? I feel dumb.

  • Very tangential question that hit me while reading the comments: Is the current scenario possible: company A owns 10% of company B, and company B owns 10% of company A. Does that mean getting the valuation of both companies require solving algebra? Or is this outright prevented by other methods, like the board of A owns most of A and 10% of B?

  • I have a question in regards of this.

    If company A owns/purchased license for a product issued by company C.

    The license clearly states:

    "Licensee may not resell, rent, lease … the Source Code or any part of it … "

    And now company A gets sold to company B.

    What should happen in this case with the License? Whom the License belongs now? Shall it be revoked or what?

    How to deal with such situations in practice?

  • This is the first acquisition I have had stocks for, where can I learn more about what happens for me?

  • In this interview, Pivotal CEO Rob Mee talks about the challenges with managing the adoption of Kubernetes.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/29/pivotal_ceo_intervi...

  • It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out regarding k8 whether companies will host it on VMs or bare metal. I guess VMWare are hoping to still be in the mix else k8 has the potential to completely erode their vsphere business.

  • Form SC : https://sec.report/Document/0001193125-19-226906/

  • Maybe Carbonblack can compete with Crowdstrike a bit more now with vmware backing them?

  • For reference Cylance was acquired for $1.4B by trashberry

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  • Does anyone know what this means for Spring Boot?