On Aug. 22, 2019, VMware announced that it would acquire sister company Pivotal Software, vendor of a widely used cloud development platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The transaction is reacquisition of software development assets that VMware spun out into a separate company in 2013 after struggling to integrate them into its primary data center management software business.
For customers, the immediate impact of the acquisition is minimal and positive. They can still turn to Pivotal for its leading cross-cloud development platform and application development and transformation services, and they can still turn to VMware for its leading software-defined infrastructure software and growing cross-cloud migration and management software. Both companies were already members of the Dell Technologies "family" of companies and sought to cooperate in servicing customers. Most recently, both Pivotal and VMware were investing heavily in helping customers transition from legacy development processes to modern, Agile software development and from traditional, virtualized, mostly on-premises infrastructure to container-based, cloud-deployed, and Kubernetes-orchestrated infrastructure.
VMware can now streamline that cooperation. It already jointly developed Kubernetes products with Pivotal while it steadily added container support to its own vSphere product line -- it hasn't always been clear which company built or sold the emerging container platform products. VMware can eliminate duplicate development efforts, reduce impedance in the sales cycle, and better direct its product and services strategy toward application development and development platforms as it aims higher up the stack to the application layer. (See Conway's law[1] for