VMware, a leading innovator in enterprise software, announced recently that it has acquired Pivotal Software Inc, a leading cloud-native platform provider. Due to this acquisition, Pivotal’s Class A common stock was being removed from listing on the New York Stock Exchange with trading suspended prior to the open market. Pivotal would now be operating as a wholly-owned subsidiary of VMware. Pivotal is now approximately valued at $2.7 billion.
The offerings of Pivotal would be centered around the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services that are designed to help customers transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications. VMware offers product building rocks and integrated solutions. This enables dramatic improvements in developer productivity in the creation of modern applications.
VMware, through this acquisition, can now transform from a pure virtual machine company into a cloud-native vendor. This would be able to manage infrastructure wherever it lives. There were two important deals that closed this year like Heptio and Bitnami.
Another strong connection between Pivotal and VMware is that Pivotal was originally created through a combination of EMC, VMware and GE. GE owned a 10 percent stake for quite sometime.
Before going public, Pivotal had raised a hefty $1.7 billion in 2018. Most of that had come in one heady day in 2016, when it announced $650 million in the funding round, that was led by Ford’s $180 million investment.
Back then, the future seemed bright enough. However, matters were quite tough as a public company. Pivotal stocks had even dropped to 42 percent in one day. At this point in time, VMware came to the rescue and had offered $15.00 a share. This was a substantial premium above low point that August.