Security company Carbon Black acquired by VMware

VMware announced in a press release that it has acquired Carbon Black, a security company that provides cloud-native endpoint security. The deal has been signed for an amount of about 2.1 billion dollars (1.9 billion euros).

Dell Technologies’ subsidiary says the acquisition helps create a security cloud for each application. It must secure enterprise workloads and users on all cloud-types and devices. Big data, behavioral analytics and AI are used for this. Carbon Black thus provides endpoint protection against advanced cyber attacks. In addition to security, the expertise of Carbon Black should also help VMware build tools for understanding application behavior. This allows users to react more quickly to cyber attacks.

Clearer security

“The security industry is ineffective, with too many fragmented solutions and no coherent platform architecture. By integrating Carbon Black into the VMware family, we are now taking a huge step forward in security and delivering an enterprise-grade platform for managing and protecting workloads, applications and networks,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. “As businesses move applications to the cloud and access the cloud over distributed networks, and from a variety of endpoints, security has become a major challenge and priority.

Carbon Black’s security software is integrated into VMware products such as AppDefense, Workspace One, NSX and SecureState. VMware hopes to become a leader in the security of modern cloud applications. Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research states in an article by SiliconAngle that Carbon Black is a significant addition to VMware. This is because endpoint security is of great importance as more and more applications migrate to the cloud. This is reinforced by the fact that companies are increasingly working with hybrid clouds. According to him, the acquisition can also be very profitable. “Carbon Black fits well with the ambition of Dell and VMware to capture a significant portion of this hybrid cloud revenue,” says Mueller.

At about the same time as this announcement, it was announced that VMware is also acquiring Pivotal Software. The announcements come a few days before VMworld, VMware’s annual event.