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VMware is acquiring Saltstack, a renowned company in the infrastructure automation market. VMware is buying this company to enhance its vRealize cloud management software suite. The deal was announced during the VMware virtual VMworld event on Tuesday.

The company debuted several new products but did not disclose any of the terms for their acquisition deal.

SaltStack is the backer of Salt, an open-source tool that many tech admins use worldwide to perform maintenance with ease. The software was downloaded more than 17 million times this year alone.

Salt is essential to VMware because they have public cloud management features. All the major infrastructure-as-a-service platform use it extensively.

Great plans ahead

Cloud support is a feature of SaltStack’s commercial version, called SaltStack Enterprise. It has extra capabilities, like automatically fixing configuration errors with minimal human involvement. 

VMware plans to combine this tech with vRealize to give users an end-to-end automation solution with integrated configuration management. 

Ajay Singh, the head of VMware’s Cloud virtualization Management Business Unit, wrote in a blog post, what they plan to do with the tech. It will be used to extend the automation features in vRealize, beyond infrastructure, to include software in companies’ virtual machines and containers.

A foray into security

The acquisition is also focused on cybersecurity. The company made some steps to get into security when they bought Carbon Black Inc. for $2.7 billion. SaltStack is another way for them to get even more into security.

It is quite likely that VMware’s future products will emphasize the easing of cloud operations, seeing as they have acquired this tool.

With the considerable resources of VMware behind the SaltStack team, they can speed up development on commercial products and their open-source tool. VMware will stand on solid ground in this important market of enterprise IT.

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