14 ms·

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

402 points by frostmatthew 7y ago

hodgesrm 7y ago
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.
- techntoke 7y ago
  I could see them pulling a Microsoft with the three Es.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    As someone pointed out to me recently, while waxing poetic about VMWare and K8s, Dell owns a big chunk of VMWare. Private Cloud buildout plays into Dell's interests, but if their execution is worse than even one Public Cloud provider, then they risk this becoming an exit strategy. You can make a lot of money off of being an exit strategy, and for quite some time. But when the evacuation is over you have nothing. Honestly if Dell does this well enough I could see them using some of IBM's old tricks. One in particular I'm thinking of is that IBM would overprovision the customer (installs are more expensive than dormant hardware). Fast forward to your next crunch time and you're oversubscribed, you call up IBM and they send you a piece of code to unlock the rest of the servers. No scheduling, no deliveries. If I'm running my own server room, it turns out having a bunch of hardware around I don't use is prohibitively expensive (in part because corporations use funny math and account for labor costs in weird ways). Which kinda bums me out because I used to get excited about ideas like running servers where it's cold to save huge amounts on electricity. But if I'm leasing hardware from Dell, then the math is simpler. Labor and travel time are the same color of money as the hardware. Installing a whole rack of servers and only leasing you a half or quarter rack at a time (and using some of the extras for hardware failure) might be more cost effective. And I'm sure IBM knew what they were doing. The immediacy of picking up a phone and having 'more hardware' today versus scheduling it three weeks out (and having the team decide to prioritize optimization work) must be more lucrative. If a little bit like drug dealing...
- brown9-2 7y ago
  Who uses the Pivotal distribution of Kubernetes? Why?
  - IanGabes 7y ago
    My team and i tried leveraging different pivotal products as part of a test deployment of our current esxi managed vm deployment imagined through the pivotal kubernetes deploy. We found that Pivotal's kubernetes makes it easy to run kubernetes on top of existing vmware infrastructure, so our ops team could continue to manage their normal vmware stack, with an admin interface to manage kubernetes clusters that live within esxi. They could provision us devs with a cluster for a specific use, and hand us the keys to do the rest. It was pretty cool, except for the fact that we discovered kernel incompatibility with the underlying esxi version/os that brought down the entire deployment repeatedly a few days before the event where we intended to stress test the product. The use case is definitely there for larger orgs who want to share hardware, but you also get the "on prem cloud" quick wins. Our experiment obviously failed in a low risk way, but i think the idea is sound.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      For me, "on prem cloud" always sounds like buying a car and renting it back to yourself.
      - stevehiehn 7y ago
        Haha, I don't agree but that is really funny :)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - Spivak 7y ago
        I think the terminology is a little silly but presenting your devs with an abstract view of the underlying physical/virtual infrastructure is good for the ops and dev teams in terms of flexibility. It’s a framework that makes it hard for one side to accidentally depend on something they shouldn’t.
seabrookmx 7y ago
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.
- geodel 7y ago
  Ah this makes sense. There was this vague references in my mind that SpringSource belonged to VMware and now Pivotal is parent company for Spring. So they are all kinda together.
  - markdoubleyou 7y ago
    Yeah, they're back to owing Spring again. I wonder about the future of developer-centric Pivotal products. VMWare already acquired Spring, RabbitMQ, and GemFire back in 2009/2010 and then spun them off into Pivotal. So now that they've gone and acquired them again, will they divest again and just hold on to the K8s bits? VMWare is totally geared toward selling into IT orgs and has never seemed interested in dealing with developers.
    - geodel 7y ago
      I maybe wrong and many will vehemently disagree here. But I feel this whole Spring Boot thing and other dozens of Spring products are going to collapse like Java EE business for many other vendors. From what I am seeing at my workplace this whole meta framework/API things that they promote is leading to atrocious application development.
      - ellius 7y ago
        Can you elaborate? I work on a Spring Boot application and so far we're all pretty happy with it. Obviously I'm one data point, so I'd like to hear more about what you're seeing.
        geodel 7y ago
vmh1928 7y ago
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_interview/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/29/pivotal_ceo_intervi...
craigsmansion 7y ago
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.
- jabedude 7y ago
  They have developed their own kernel, it's called vmkernel.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    And it links in GPLed drivers from the Linux kernel.
    - rrdharan 7y ago
      The lawsuit was withdrawn; VMware is no longer using GPLed drivers. No precedent was established as to whether their prior use actually was a derivative work - personally I've always shared the VMware take on it that this was a loophole, and that if the VMkernel was a derivative work of Linux by virtue of the vmklinux compatibility layer, then Windows becomes a derivative work of any open source driver, which doesn't make any sense...
      - kijiki 7y ago
        The official VMware take, at least while we were there, was that the vmkernel itself was a binary only kernel module loaded by the Console OS's Linux kernel, and as such was no different than the binary-only Nvidia driver. This was a bit sketchy, since the vmkernel linked in a different version of the GPL'd drivers in question than the ones in the Console OS, but you know, close enough. Of course, when ESXi shipped without a console OS, but with a vmklinux and GPL'd drivers, a new take was needed.
        monocasa 7y ago
        Which is funny, because that doesn't match Nvidia's legal theory as to why they're allowed to ship binary drivers. The Nvidia blob doesn't import, export, or reimplement any Linux symbols (that's relegated to an open source, dual GPLv2/proprietary bridge). The Nvidia blob is also way older than their Linux port, being the same codebase as their Windows driver. They believe that a judge will look at those facts and rule that there's no way their blob is derived from the Linux kernel. It seems like neither of those applied to vmklinux.
the_common_man 7y ago
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?
- kcb 7y ago
  Carbon Black makes great malware that causes your brand new work computer to feel like its 1999.
  - techwizrd 7y ago
    Yup. You cannot get malware or run non-whitelisted programs if Carbon Black brings your computer to a grinding halt and eats all your battery.
    - foobiekr 7y ago
      I cannot emphasize this enough: the most amazing thing about carbon black is there are actually options that are worse in terms of performance impact (and much, much worse in terms of increased attack surface). There was a time I would not have thought that possible.
    - downrightmike 7y ago
      Corporate policy: also install CB on all VMs running too. CB inception.
      - iwantagrinder 7y ago
        Do not take your security team for granted. They're already doing more than most, sadly.
  - Kaizen_Geek 7y ago
    Agreed! I've gathered that it's a powerful toolset "if" tuned to your environment. But as a new midsize customer of CbDefense we've encountered many performance issues (many of them network file access related) with sensor v3.4. So rolled back to v3.2 but then found out that only Win7 endpoints could use v3.2 and Win10 requires v3.4... SMH
Blackstone4 7y ago
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.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  It really doesn't. Not in a decade at least. Even moderately modern applications still need a lot of work to be ported to a "container native" platform to run properly following best practices. The sea of legacy out there will keep VMware's virtualization business afloat for a long time.
- AlexB138 7y ago
  > ... how things pan out regarding k8 I've been seeing this mistake a lot. Just to clear up confusion for people: K8s is not plural. It's a shortening convention (similar to i18n) where you trim the middle letters out of a long word and replace it with the number of characters you've trimmed. K(ubernete)s = K8s because "ubernete" is 8 characters. K8 is never the correct word to refer to it.
  - liquid153 7y ago
    Cool story bro
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    That's right: you should bark out "K9" instead.
- kijiki 7y ago
  K8s was written by a hopeful public cloud giant to cut off the dominant public cloud giant in the container orchestration space. It shouldn't be surprising that it is very oriented around VMs hosted and manged by public cloud providers. Bare metal is at best an afterthought, and at worst explicitly disadvantaged.
anarazel 7y ago
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.
- xigency 7y ago
  For mobile: > 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.
  - gigatexal 7y ago
    Thank you!
  - raviolo 7y ago
    This is why I enjoy HN community
lgats 7y ago
Form SC : https://sec.report/Document/0001193125-19-226906/ https://sec.report/Document/0001193125-19-226906/
pfarnsworth 7y ago
[deleted]
- downrightmike 7y ago
  Works well for Michael Dell.
badrabbit 7y ago
Maybe Carbonblack can compete with Crowdstrike a bit more now with vmware backing them?
- jjirsa 7y ago
  When I think of business agility and ability to keep up with a fast moving industry, I think Dell/VMWare.
  - thunderthunder 7y ago
    Haha
  - badrabbit 7y ago
    Hey,I didn't know VMWare had a bad rep. Someone else also made a similar sarcastic comment. Even if it was Oracle or IBM, big money solves some problems.
    - jjirsa 7y ago
      Oracle and IBM are better known for killing things they acquire than enhancing them. The money doesn't outweigh the executive overhead. And it's not that vmware is bad, it's that they're big, enterprise'y, and slow. They'll make their money selling VM management software to companies that can't adapt to the cloud. But that's what they do - they make their money selling software to companies that can't adapt.
- hsnewman 7y ago
  They gotta fix their product to not interfere with production software. We switched to Crowdstrike for just that reason.
  - badrabbit 7y ago
    That bad? I love Crowdstrike myself but will need to use CB soon.
boynamedsue 7y ago
Checkout Carbon Black’s stock today before the announcement. It was way up, well before the news became public ....
- whatshisface 7y ago
  If I was going to execute an acquisition, I would buy a bunch of shares, or maybe some kind of derivative, well before I let anybody know what I was doing. Would that be legal? Edit: by "I" I mean the company, not the CEO.
  - conroy 7y ago
    I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t that the definition of insider trading?
    - wpietri 7y ago
      It is very much insider trading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading
  - ternaryoperator 7y ago
    If any part of that purchase is the result of information that is not yet public, you've committed insider trading (at least in the US).
    - jxi 7y ago
      Isn't it only inside trading if it's a breach of contract? If you're part of either the company being acquired or doing the acquiring then it's breach of contract and therefore insider trading. If I find a random piece of paper on the floor about the future acquisition and trade based on that info, I don't think it's considered insider trading. The person who dropped that paper would likely get into some trouble though. It's not really a matter of if the info is public or not, otherwise every hedge fund would be out of business.
    - 7y ago
abalone 7y ago
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.
- parasubvert 7y ago
  PVTL's public shareholders will be getting a premium price per share at $15. Michael Dell holds the vast majority of shares and will instead be getting VMware stock for Pivotal stock.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
nscalf 7y ago
This is the first acquisition I have had stocks for, where can I learn more about what happens for me?
- make3 7y ago
  don't you just own stocks that are worth more?
- ak217 7y ago
  I don't know of any resources for this, though I'm sure there are some good pages on this that are googlable. Here is my experience, having owned a few tiny positions in stocks that went through a merger. - The moment the merger terms became public, your stock got the merger priced in by the market makers - minus a small discount representing the chance that the merger won't go through. Now it's going to trade mostly pegged to the parent stock, as if the merger had already happened (or flatline, if the buyout was all in cash). To keep shareholders happy, mergers usually happen at a 20-50% bonus over the purchased company's stock price, so this is a great event for you - the parent company just boosted your position. - Your broker will automatically execute the merger transaction for you. The stock will disappear from your account, and a commensurate amount of cash and/or parent company stock will re-appear. This should show up under "Corporate actions" in your brokerage account or similar. - I'm not aware of anything special that will happen otherwise. The merger closing (usually in 6 months or so) will represent the removal of uncertainty, which will give your position a bump, but that bump is usually tiny. So you can sell if you have reason to believe the deal won't go through (watch out for short term cap gains), or hold, if you like the parent company.
  - nscalf 7y ago
    This was really helpful, thank you! As far as short term capital gains, the stock recently cut in half due to an awful quarter—-I think with the bump from this news I’m still down 20%. But it’s okay, glad to have recouped some losses.
- projektfu 7y ago
  Most public companies have an Investor Relations link on their homepages.
ale22 7y ago
Does anyone know what this means for Spring Boot?
arithma 7y ago
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?
- mruts 7y ago
  There’s no reason why such a structure shouldn’t exist. I believe this how a lot of Japanese conglomerates are structured: different companies structured around a central company bank with each company owning a piece of all the others.
  - lloeki 7y ago
    Nissan and Renault have this structure (43% and 15% respectively) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi_Alliance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi_Al...
c-smile 7y ago
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?
- PersonalOps 7y ago
  I asked the same thing a few years back. A lawyer friend of mine (not legal advice) said the company with the license does not need to transfer it since it's still used within the same customer: the company. The only difference is the definition of the company changed to include far more branches of employees, IP, and more. Think about name changes for humans. You don't have to re-sign all of your contracts and potentially pay penalties for breaking and re-entering contracts in doing so. It is understood that you're still the same person but going by another identifier. Same here. Same company, another identifier.
  - c-smile 7y ago
    Thanks, but the text of the license also states "All Source Code provided with Software... must be protected" Yet particular license type is dependent on size of organization. A+B entity is clearly not the same as just entity B so something needs to be done in regards of this, no?
- jm4 7y ago
  The contracts often say that. In practice, it's never used and vendors generally behave pretty reasonably. I work for a company that has made numerous acquisitions over the past few years. Sometimes it's not an acquisition and the other company has dissolved and the key people have accepted positions with us without transferring any assets or liabilities. I've never had a vendor forbid us from transferring licenses in either case. In fact, they usually reach out pretty quickly to update the name, contact info, etc. With some of the niche enterprise stuff, it's good business for them because the alternative probably means losing a customer. They'd rather let us keep using the software and likely pay for at least one annual renewal than try to hit us up for new licenses and we tell them to take a hike. Even huge vendors will do it though. Microsoft has let me transfer licenses before. That kind of language in the contract is basically to prevent you from selling/transferring the license to some other unrelated company.
notus 7y ago
For reference Cylance was acquired for $1.4B by trashberry

402 points by frostmatthew 7y ago

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.

techntoke 7y ago
I could see them pulling a Microsoft with the three Es.
- hinkley 7y ago
  As someone pointed out to me recently, while waxing poetic about VMWare and K8s, Dell owns a big chunk of VMWare. Private Cloud buildout plays into Dell's interests, but if their execution is worse than even one Public Cloud provider, then they risk this becoming an exit strategy. You can make a lot of money off of being an exit strategy, and for quite some time. But when the evacuation is over you have nothing. Honestly if Dell does this well enough I could see them using some of IBM's old tricks. One in particular I'm thinking of is that IBM would overprovision the customer (installs are more expensive than dormant hardware). Fast forward to your next crunch time and you're oversubscribed, you call up IBM and they send you a piece of code to unlock the rest of the servers. No scheduling, no deliveries. If I'm running my own server room, it turns out having a bunch of hardware around I don't use is prohibitively expensive (in part because corporations use funny math and account for labor costs in weird ways). Which kinda bums me out because I used to get excited about ideas like running servers where it's cold to save huge amounts on electricity. But if I'm leasing hardware from Dell, then the math is simpler. Labor and travel time are the same color of money as the hardware. Installing a whole rack of servers and only leasing you a half or quarter rack at a time (and using some of the extras for hardware failure) might be more cost effective. And I'm sure IBM knew what they were doing. The immediacy of picking up a phone and having 'more hardware' today versus scheduling it three weeks out (and having the team decide to prioritize optimization work) must be more lucrative. If a little bit like drug dealing...
brown9-2 7y ago
Who uses the Pivotal distribution of Kubernetes? Why?
- IanGabes 7y ago
  My team and i tried leveraging different pivotal products as part of a test deployment of our current esxi managed vm deployment imagined through the pivotal kubernetes deploy. We found that Pivotal's kubernetes makes it easy to run kubernetes on top of existing vmware infrastructure, so our ops team could continue to manage their normal vmware stack, with an admin interface to manage kubernetes clusters that live within esxi. They could provision us devs with a cluster for a specific use, and hand us the keys to do the rest. It was pretty cool, except for the fact that we discovered kernel incompatibility with the underlying esxi version/os that brought down the entire deployment repeatedly a few days before the event where we intended to stress test the product. The use case is definitely there for larger orgs who want to share hardware, but you also get the "on prem cloud" quick wins. Our experiment obviously failed in a low risk way, but i think the idea is sound.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    For me, "on prem cloud" always sounds like buying a car and renting it back to yourself.
    - stevehiehn 7y ago
      Haha, I don't agree but that is really funny :)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Spivak 7y ago
      I think the terminology is a little silly but presenting your devs with an abstract view of the underlying physical/virtual infrastructure is good for the ops and dev teams in terms of flexibility. It’s a framework that makes it hard for one side to accidentally depend on something they shouldn’t.

seabrookmx 7y ago

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.

geodel 7y ago
Ah this makes sense. There was this vague references in my mind that SpringSource belonged to VMware and now Pivotal is parent company for Spring. So they are all kinda together.
- markdoubleyou 7y ago
  Yeah, they're back to owing Spring again. I wonder about the future of developer-centric Pivotal products. VMWare already acquired Spring, RabbitMQ, and GemFire back in 2009/2010 and then spun them off into Pivotal. So now that they've gone and acquired them again, will they divest again and just hold on to the K8s bits? VMWare is totally geared toward selling into IT orgs and has never seemed interested in dealing with developers.
  - geodel 7y ago
    I maybe wrong and many will vehemently disagree here. But I feel this whole Spring Boot thing and other dozens of Spring products are going to collapse like Java EE business for many other vendors. From what I am seeing at my workplace this whole meta framework/API things that they promote is leading to atrocious application development.
    - ellius 7y ago
      Can you elaborate? I work on a Spring Boot application and so far we're all pretty happy with it. Obviously I'm one data point, so I'd like to hear more about what you're seeing.
      - geodel 7y ago

vmh1928 7y ago

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

craigsmansion 7y ago

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.

jabedude 7y ago
They have developed their own kernel, it's called vmkernel.
- monocasa 7y ago
  And it links in GPLed drivers from the Linux kernel.
  - rrdharan 7y ago
    The lawsuit was withdrawn; VMware is no longer using GPLed drivers. No precedent was established as to whether their prior use actually was a derivative work - personally I've always shared the VMware take on it that this was a loophole, and that if the VMkernel was a derivative work of Linux by virtue of the vmklinux compatibility layer, then Windows becomes a derivative work of any open source driver, which doesn't make any sense...
    - kijiki 7y ago
      The official VMware take, at least while we were there, was that the vmkernel itself was a binary only kernel module loaded by the Console OS's Linux kernel, and as such was no different than the binary-only Nvidia driver. This was a bit sketchy, since the vmkernel linked in a different version of the GPL'd drivers in question than the ones in the Console OS, but you know, close enough. Of course, when ESXi shipped without a console OS, but with a vmklinux and GPL'd drivers, a new take was needed.
      - monocasa 7y ago
        Which is funny, because that doesn't match Nvidia's legal theory as to why they're allowed to ship binary drivers. The Nvidia blob doesn't import, export, or reimplement any Linux symbols (that's relegated to an open source, dual GPLv2/proprietary bridge). The Nvidia blob is also way older than their Linux port, being the same codebase as their Windows driver. They believe that a judge will look at those facts and rule that there's no way their blob is derived from the Linux kernel. It seems like neither of those applied to vmklinux.

the_common_man 7y ago

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?

kcb 7y ago
Carbon Black makes great malware that causes your brand new work computer to feel like its 1999.
- techwizrd 7y ago
  Yup. You cannot get malware or run non-whitelisted programs if Carbon Black brings your computer to a grinding halt and eats all your battery.
  - foobiekr 7y ago
    I cannot emphasize this enough: the most amazing thing about carbon black is there are actually options that are worse in terms of performance impact (and much, much worse in terms of increased attack surface). There was a time I would not have thought that possible.
  - downrightmike 7y ago
    Corporate policy: also install CB on all VMs running too. CB inception.
    - iwantagrinder 7y ago
      Do not take your security team for granted. They're already doing more than most, sadly.
- Kaizen_Geek 7y ago
  Agreed! I've gathered that it's a powerful toolset "if" tuned to your environment. But as a new midsize customer of CbDefense we've encountered many performance issues (many of them network file access related) with sensor v3.4. So rolled back to v3.2 but then found out that only Win7 endpoints could use v3.2 and Win10 requires v3.4... SMH

Blackstone4 7y ago

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.

gtirloni 7y ago
It really doesn't. Not in a decade at least. Even moderately modern applications still need a lot of work to be ported to a "container native" platform to run properly following best practices. The sea of legacy out there will keep VMware's virtualization business afloat for a long time.
AlexB138 7y ago
> ... how things pan out regarding k8 I've been seeing this mistake a lot. Just to clear up confusion for people: K8s is not plural. It's a shortening convention (similar to i18n) where you trim the middle letters out of a long word and replace it with the number of characters you've trimmed. K(ubernete)s = K8s because "ubernete" is 8 characters. K8 is never the correct word to refer to it.
- liquid153 7y ago
  Cool story bro
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  That's right: you should bark out "K9" instead.
kijiki 7y ago
K8s was written by a hopeful public cloud giant to cut off the dominant public cloud giant in the container orchestration space. It shouldn't be surprising that it is very oriented around VMs hosted and manged by public cloud providers. Bare metal is at best an afterthought, and at worst explicitly disadvantaged.

anarazel 7y ago

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.

xigency 7y ago
For mobile: > 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.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  Thank you!
- raviolo 7y ago
  This is why I enjoy HN community

lgats 7y ago

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

pfarnsworth 7y ago

[deleted]

downrightmike 7y ago
Works well for Michael Dell.

badrabbit 7y ago

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

jjirsa 7y ago
When I think of business agility and ability to keep up with a fast moving industry, I think Dell/VMWare.
- thunderthunder 7y ago
  Haha
- badrabbit 7y ago
  Hey,I didn't know VMWare had a bad rep. Someone else also made a similar sarcastic comment. Even if it was Oracle or IBM, big money solves some problems.
  - jjirsa 7y ago
    Oracle and IBM are better known for killing things they acquire than enhancing them. The money doesn't outweigh the executive overhead. And it's not that vmware is bad, it's that they're big, enterprise'y, and slow. They'll make their money selling VM management software to companies that can't adapt to the cloud. But that's what they do - they make their money selling software to companies that can't adapt.
hsnewman 7y ago
They gotta fix their product to not interfere with production software. We switched to Crowdstrike for just that reason.
- badrabbit 7y ago
  That bad? I love Crowdstrike myself but will need to use CB soon.

boynamedsue 7y ago

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

whatshisface 7y ago
If I was going to execute an acquisition, I would buy a bunch of shares, or maybe some kind of derivative, well before I let anybody know what I was doing. Would that be legal? Edit: by "I" I mean the company, not the CEO.
- conroy 7y ago
  I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t that the definition of insider trading?
  - wpietri 7y ago
    It is very much insider trading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading
- ternaryoperator 7y ago
  If any part of that purchase is the result of information that is not yet public, you've committed insider trading (at least in the US).
  - jxi 7y ago
    Isn't it only inside trading if it's a breach of contract? If you're part of either the company being acquired or doing the acquiring then it's breach of contract and therefore insider trading. If I find a random piece of paper on the floor about the future acquisition and trade based on that info, I don't think it's considered insider trading. The person who dropped that paper would likely get into some trouble though. It's not really a matter of if the info is public or not, otherwise every hedge fund would be out of business.
  - 7y ago

abalone 7y ago

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.

parasubvert 7y ago
PVTL's public shareholders will be getting a premium price per share at $15. Michael Dell holds the vast majority of shares and will instead be getting VMware stock for Pivotal stock.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

nscalf 7y ago

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

make3 7y ago
don't you just own stocks that are worth more?
ak217 7y ago
I don't know of any resources for this, though I'm sure there are some good pages on this that are googlable. Here is my experience, having owned a few tiny positions in stocks that went through a merger. - The moment the merger terms became public, your stock got the merger priced in by the market makers - minus a small discount representing the chance that the merger won't go through. Now it's going to trade mostly pegged to the parent stock, as if the merger had already happened (or flatline, if the buyout was all in cash). To keep shareholders happy, mergers usually happen at a 20-50% bonus over the purchased company's stock price, so this is a great event for you - the parent company just boosted your position. - Your broker will automatically execute the merger transaction for you. The stock will disappear from your account, and a commensurate amount of cash and/or parent company stock will re-appear. This should show up under "Corporate actions" in your brokerage account or similar. - I'm not aware of anything special that will happen otherwise. The merger closing (usually in 6 months or so) will represent the removal of uncertainty, which will give your position a bump, but that bump is usually tiny. So you can sell if you have reason to believe the deal won't go through (watch out for short term cap gains), or hold, if you like the parent company.
- nscalf 7y ago
  This was really helpful, thank you! As far as short term capital gains, the stock recently cut in half due to an awful quarter—-I think with the bump from this news I’m still down 20%. But it’s okay, glad to have recouped some losses.
projektfu 7y ago
Most public companies have an Investor Relations link on their homepages.

ale22 7y ago

Does anyone know what this means for Spring Boot?

arithma 7y ago

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?

mruts 7y ago
There’s no reason why such a structure shouldn’t exist. I believe this how a lot of Japanese conglomerates are structured: different companies structured around a central company bank with each company owning a piece of all the others.
- lloeki 7y ago
  Nissan and Renault have this structure (43% and 15% respectively) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi_Alliance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi_Al...

c-smile 7y ago

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?

PersonalOps 7y ago
I asked the same thing a few years back. A lawyer friend of mine (not legal advice) said the company with the license does not need to transfer it since it's still used within the same customer: the company. The only difference is the definition of the company changed to include far more branches of employees, IP, and more. Think about name changes for humans. You don't have to re-sign all of your contracts and potentially pay penalties for breaking and re-entering contracts in doing so. It is understood that you're still the same person but going by another identifier. Same here. Same company, another identifier.
- c-smile 7y ago
  Thanks, but the text of the license also states "All Source Code provided with Software... must be protected" Yet particular license type is dependent on size of organization. A+B entity is clearly not the same as just entity B so something needs to be done in regards of this, no?
jm4 7y ago
The contracts often say that. In practice, it's never used and vendors generally behave pretty reasonably. I work for a company that has made numerous acquisitions over the past few years. Sometimes it's not an acquisition and the other company has dissolved and the key people have accepted positions with us without transferring any assets or liabilities. I've never had a vendor forbid us from transferring licenses in either case. In fact, they usually reach out pretty quickly to update the name, contact info, etc. With some of the niche enterprise stuff, it's good business for them because the alternative probably means losing a customer. They'd rather let us keep using the software and likely pay for at least one annual renewal than try to hit us up for new licenses and we tell them to take a hike. Even huge vendors will do it though. Microsoft has let me transfer licenses before. That kind of language in the contract is basically to prevent you from selling/transferring the license to some other unrelated company.

notus 7y ago

For reference Cylance was acquired for $1.4B by trashberry