VMware to Acquire Carbon Black at $2.1 Billion valuation

VMware announced the acquisition of Carbon Black at a valuation of $2.1 Billion. VMware is offering $26 per share in an all-cash transaction.

Founded in 2002, Greater Boston headquartered Carbon Black offers cloud-native endpoint protection solutions dedicated to keeping the world safe from cyberattacks. The company has raised $191.7 million in 11 funding rounds.

The acquisition will position VMware to deliver intrinsic cloud security to protect enterprise workloads and clients through big data, behavioral analytics and AI, the announcement notes.

Executive Opinion

CEO, VMware, Pat Gelsinger, said, "The security industry is broken and ineffective with too many fragmented solutions and no cohesive platform architecture. By bringing Carbon Black into the VMware family, we are now taking a huge step forward in security and delivering an enterprise-grade platform to administer and protect workloads, applications, and networks. With this acquisition, VMware will also take a significant leadership position in security for the new age of modern applications delivered from any cloud to any device."

CEO, Carbon Black, Patrick Morley, said, "Today marks an exciting milestone for Carbon Black, VMware and the entire cybersecurity industry. We now have the opportunity to seamlessly integrate Carbon Black’s cloud-native endpoint protection platform into all of VMware’s control points. This type of bold move is exactly what the IT and security industries have been looking to see for a very long time. We look forward to working with the VMware team to continue delivering a modern security cloud platform to customers around the world. Additionally, we’re pleased that today’s transaction provides Carbon Black’s shareholders with immediate and substantial value.”

VMware and Cloud Security

Carbon Black leverages big data and behavioral analytics to provide endpoint protection against even the most advanced cyberattacks.

VMware plans to combine Carbon Black’s security solutions with VMware’s AppDefense, Workspace ONE, NSX and SecureState offerings. This acquisition will help VMware create a modern security cloud platform offerings for any application, running on any cloud, on any device. The new offerings will deliver advanced threat detection and in-depth application behavior insight to stop sophisticated attacks and accelerate responses, the announcement notes.

VMware will leverage leading managed security players, channel partners and system integrators to accelerate the adoption of Carbon Black in the enterprise

In February 2018, VMware acquired CloudCoreo to secure and manage applications in a multi-cloud world. In subsequent month of March 2018, VMware also acquired E8 Security that uses AI / ML to surface anomalies and suspicious behaviors, discover malicious activity, and correlate data from different sources.