VMware Continues Its 2019 Buying Spree with Acquisitions of Veriflow, Intrinsic and Carbon Black
August 23, 2019
Author: David Marshall
As we head into VMworld, the annual virtualization and cloud event hosted by VMware, there have been numerous announcements that VMware is on a shopping spree gathering up technologies that will fill in the gaps as the company moves forward.
A week ago, VMware announced its intent to acquire Veriflow, a startup that offers intent-based network verification, in order to strengthen VMware’s capabilities in the pervasive network monitoring, troubleshooting, and verification space. Upon completion of the acquisition, the virtualization giant intends to integrate Veriflow into their existing vRealize Network Insight product in order to increase their overall network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities. VMware also wants to add new dimensions of network verification and ‘What-If’ analysis directly into the platform.
In a recent blog post, Anders Hudson of VMware said Veriflow’s product “helps customers model, analyze, and verify their hybrid networks to allow IT teams to operate, increase the security of, and build resilient networks.” And went on to say, “Veriflow’s technology provides problem detection for critical network issues (physical and virtual).”
Founded in 2013, San Jose-based Veriflow has raised $11.1 million in funding led by Menlo Ventures along with New Enterprise Associates (NEA). An acquisition price tag has not been disclosed.
Just shortly after the Veriflow news, VMware announced it acquired a small startup from the San Francisco area, Intrinsic, an application runtime security company. The acquisition pushes VMware further into emerging technologies like containers and serverless.
Founded in 2015, Intrinsic helps software developers securely tap serverless computing and lets users set policies about how these systems can operate. Intrinsic currently works with serverless offerings from cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.
The acquisition of Intrinsic adds serverless security to VMware’s rapidly expanding cloud portfolio. And according to VMware, the company will use that technology to expand the VMware AppDefense platform into the public cloud. AppDefense, unveiled at VMworld 2017, is a data center endpoint security product that protects applications running in virtualized environments. Instead of chasing after threats, AppDefense understands an application’s intended state and behavior, then monitors for changes to that intended state that indicate a threat. When a threat is detected, AppDefense automatically responds.
Financial terms of this deal were also not disclosed.
This week, and rounding out the shopping cart, VMware announced that it is acquiring Carbon Black for its security technology at a price tag of around $2.1 billion, in order to further enhance VMware’s AppDefense security offering.
According to VMware, Carbon Black has built “a smart lightweight agent for a broad set of devices and workload endpoints with big data security analytics that’s built on scalable multi-tenant, cloud-native architecture.”
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said he expects the technology to be integrated across VMware’s family of products including NSX networking software and vSphere, the company’s flagship virtualization platform.
Patric Morley, president and CEO of Carbon Black wrote on his corporate blog, “VMware has a vision to create a modern security platform for any app, running on any cloud, delivered to any device – essentially, to build security into the fabric of the compute stack. Carbon Black’s cloud-native platform, our ability to see and stop attackers by leveraging the power of our rich data and behavioral analytics, and our deep cybersecurity expertise are all truly differentiating.”
These are just a few of the latest acquisitions made by VMware this year. They will join the ranks of Avi Networks, Bitfusion, Uhana, and Heptio. And of course, who could forget about the recently mentioned VMware plans for Pivotal.
You can bet these technology buys will take center stage during the keynote presentations at VMworld 2019, where execs will discuss further how they will be stitched together to further build out their portfolio.
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About the Author
David Marshall is an industry recognized virtualization and cloud computing expert, an eleven time recipient of the VMware vExpert distinction, and has been heavily involved in the industry for the past 20+ years. To help solve industry challenges, he co-founded and helped start several successful virtualization software companies such as ProTier, Surgient, Hyper9 and Vertiscale. He also spent a number of years transforming desktop virtualization while at Virtual Bridges.
David is an author of two very popular server virtualization books and the Technical Editor on Wiley’s “Virtualization for Dummies” and “VMware VI3 for Dummies” books. David authored countless articles for a number of well known technical magazines, including: InfoWorld, Virtual-Strategy and TechTarget. In 2004, he founded the oldest independent virtualization and cloud computing news site, VMblog.com, which he still operates today.
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