from Hacker News

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

by frostmatthew on 8/22/19, 9:54 PM with 150 comments

  • by anarazel on 8/22/19, 11:41 PM

    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.

  • by seabrookmx on 8/22/19, 10:27 PM

    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.

  • by boynamedsue on 8/23/19, 2:24 AM

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

  • by the_common_man on 8/22/19, 10:35 PM

    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?

  • by craigsmansion on 8/22/19, 10:34 PM

    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.

  • by hodgesrm on 8/22/19, 10:18 PM

    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.

  • by abalone on 8/23/19, 2:31 AM

    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.

  • by arithma on 8/23/19, 11:07 AM

    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?

  • by c-smile on 8/23/19, 1:32 PM

    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?

  • by nscalf on 8/23/19, 2:38 AM

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

  • by vmh1928 on 8/22/19, 10:34 PM

    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...

  • by Blackstone4 on 8/22/19, 11:25 PM

    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.

  • by lgats on 8/23/19, 12:06 AM

  • by badrabbit on 8/23/19, 1:36 AM

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

  • by notus on 8/23/19, 2:13 PM

    For reference Cylance was acquired for $1.4B by trashberry

  • by pfarnsworth on 8/23/19, 12:22 AM

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