VMware completes acquisition of Pivotal, connects infrastructure and application owners to boost software delivery, business outcomes

VMware announced Monday that it has completed the acquisition of Pivotal Software. With the completion of the acquisition, Pivotal’s Class A common stock was removed from listing on the New York Stock Exchange with trading suspended prior to the open of the market today, and Pivotal will now operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of VMware. The transaction represented an enterprise value for Pivotal of approximately $2.7 billion.

Under the terms of the transaction, Pivotal’s Class A common stockholders are entitled to receive $15.00 per share cash for each share held (without interest and less applicable tax withholdings), and Pivotal’s Class B common stockholder, Dell Technologies, received approximately 7.2 million shares of VMware Class B common stock, at an exchange ratio of 0.0550 shares of VMware Class B common stock for each share of Pivotal Class B common stock.

Pivotal’s offerings will be core to the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services designed to help customers transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications, with Kubernetes as the common infrastructure substrate. 

The combination of Pivotal’s developer-centric offerings with VMware’s upstream Kubernetes run-time infrastructure and management tools will deliver a comprehensive enterprise solution that enables dramatic improvements in developer productivity in the creation of modern applications. VMware is able to offer product building blocks and integrated solutions that are tested and proven with technical expertise that customers need to accelerate software delivery across data center, cloud and edge environments.

“It's my pleasure to announce Ray O'Farrell as the leader of VMware’s new Modern Applications Platform business unit—uniting the Pivotal and VMware Cloud Native Applications teams,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “And as Pivotal is now part of VMware, I want to thank the Pivotal leadership team for building a great company. Together, we’re poised to be the leading enabler of Kubernetes with a deep understanding of both operators and developers.”

“Digital transformation and the applications that drive it should not be restricted only to cloud and software giants,” said Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager, Modern Applications Platform Business Unit, VMware. “We believe that modern application development solutions and practices need to be easily accessible to everyday enterprises across the globe. With Pivotal’s developer capabilities as the foundation, we’ll focus on delivering consumable, enterprise-ready cloud native offerings to customers to help them achieve better business outcomes.”  

“Pivotal has fundamentally changed how the world’s biggest brands build and manage software with a focus on developer productivity through platform abstractions and development techniques as well as connecting the business with the developer,” said Edward Hieatt, senior vice president, customer success, Pivotal. “The combination of Pivotal and VMware offers the most comprehensive application platform in the industry and is a win for our customers, a win for Pivotal, and a win for VMware. We’re excited to team up with VMware to help more enterprises become like modern software companies by adopting DevOps and Lean techniques developed by internet giants and the startup community.”

Numerous mutual customers including Raytheon have reacted positively to the news of the acquisition. “By working with both Pivotal and VMware, we’ve been able to completely transform how we write software for our military and government customers,” said Todd Probert, vice president for C2, Space and Intelligence at Raytheon. “Combining these companies under a single umbrella is going to make it possible for my team to get code to our customers even faster and easier.”

Deloitte and Google Cloud unveil plans to collaborate on next-generation security offerings

Building on their existing global alliance, Deloitte and Google Cloud announces that they will jointly leverage the strength of their portfolios in cyber and cloud solutions to provide customers with end-to-end secure cloud transformation services and solutions in support of their digital transformation journeys and to better combat cyber threats.

As organizations move more of their businesses to the cloud, better control over data and activities in the cloud, as well as preventing privilege misuse, becomes critically important. Migrating a single application to cloud can seem straightforward, but more often, that application's function is tied to multiple business processes. Deloitte employs complex logic, data-driven analysis, and automated tools to rapidly map your applications and infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), helping to increase speed, quality and savings.

Deloitte has received Google Cloud’s Cloud Migration and Infrastructure specializations, demonstrating success in architecting and building GCP infrastructure and workflows, and migrating customer workloads to GCP.

Google Cloud’s infrastructure is designed, built and operated with rigorous attention to security. Deloitte has spent decades helping clients protect their businesses from security threats, and can help move securely to the cloud.

As clients increasingly leverage cloud native services to modernize their existing application portfolios and build new and innovative products and services for their customers, they turn to us to help drive increased value through Google Cloud. Its functional knowledge of client businesses and products, combined with the capability of Google Cloud services, helps clients reduce technology operating costs, accelerate innovation, and increase business agility and security.

Through its alliance with SAP, Deloitte and Google have the people, knowledge and experience to help capture the transformative potential of SAP running on Google’s fast, reliable, and global platform. Its integrated SAP offering can help leverage the power of SAP S/4 HANA and Deloitte’s preconfigured solutions to devise a comprehensive cloud strategy.

As a recognized global leader in business analytics and business strategy, Deloitte and Google are able to help harness the power of Google Cloud’s array of big data processing and analytics tools to enable data-driven insights at speeds and volumes that were previously unimaginable. Combined with its cognitive computing practices, Deloitte uses Google Cloud’s machine learning engine to provide next-generation machine learning offerings that help solve tough business challenges.

Deloitte provides dedicated, active, scalable cloud management as a service to help you set the pace of change in your industry. We leverage our secure platform and worldwide network of specialists to understand every dimension of your challenges and how they impact your requirements. Deloitte’s business insight, coupled with turnkey, on-demand cloud management offerings on Google Cloud, make it possible to accelerate the path to cloud.

"The increasing integration, interconnectedness, and data exchange of our businesses and lives create shared vulnerabilities where a problem in one area can quickly cascade into another. By building security into these environments, organizations can better protect their data, privacy, and operations," said Deborah Golden, U.S. cyber leader, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory, and principal in Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Together with Google, we are supporting secure transformative change for our clients, something that all organizations should prioritize, and can enable them to be better secured in their critical cyber and cloud needs."

"For enterprise customers moving to the cloud, security isn't an afterthought, it's at the top of every CIO's list, and in general is a board level topic," said Sunil Potti, vice president engineering at Google Cloud Security. "Building in the right security processes and controls from the beginning of the cloud journey can significantly reduce risks and costs for customers, and so we are delighted to be collaborating with Deloitte to help deliver end-to-end security services and solutions to our joint-customers."

As a Google Cloud Security Premier Partner, Deloitte offers cloud security services to its clients globally and helps assist Google Cloud Platform customers address security, privacy and compliance related risks as they migrate and transform their business in the cloud. 

As part of growing the alliance, Deloitte will offer Google Cloud customers cloud security solutions in the areas of security monitoring and threat response, zero trust, identity and access management (IAM) and data security. 

The alliance will also provide next-generation capabilities that can help organizations proactively detect, continuously monitor and respond to unauthorized activity before it can adversely affect networks, and establish and operationalize a zero trust architecture and program to continuously monitor and authenticate users — constantly determining their level of risk based on who they are, what they access, and when and where they do it from. 

The companies will also enhance a digital transformation strategy and lay the foundation to leverage new data-driven identity models as they evolve, and provide a suite of services designed to help organizations address data risk management challenges and help them understand the value of their data and privacy considerations, as well as to operationalize their data risk governance program. 

Ericsson strengthens its agreement for 5G research and development with NIB

Ericsson is announcing that it has signed an agreement for credit facility with the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) for USD 150 million, maturing in 2025. Of these new funds, 98 million will replace credit with NIB that was set to mature in 2021.

In addition to strengthening Ericsson’s balance sheet and financial flexibility, the loan has been granted for the purpose of financing Ericsson to support investments in research and development (R&D) in relation to the development of 5G technology during the years 2020-2022.

Key for success in the telecom industry is the delivery of future-proof, high-quality networks and solutions. To build on its technology leadership, Ericsson invested SEK 38 billion in R&D in 2018. This has enabled the company to be the leading contributor in the development of open telecom standards, with some 49,000 patents.

"Our increased investments to secure technology leadership in 5G, IoT and digital services have enabled us to reach nearly 80 commercial 5G agreements and contracts with unique operators, 24 of which are live networks - more than any other company,” said Erik Ekudden, Ericsson chief technology officer. “In the coming years, we will see 5G networks going live around the world, with major deployments from 2020 and we expect the global number of 5G subscriptions to top 2.6 billion in 2025. The technologies that we are investing in are fundamentally changing the way we innovate, collaborate, live and do business.”

Microsoft and Oracle expand interoperability partnership to Canada to help joint customers run their mission-critical workloads

Oracle announced this week continued expansion of its cloud interoperability partnership with Microsoft to help joint customers worldwide run their mission-critical workloads across Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Its new interconnect location means enterprises can now build workloads that seamlessly interoperate between Microsoft and Oracle cloud regions in Canada. This interconnect builds on an existing partnership announced in June of 2019.

The partnership has received a huge amount of interest, as 80 percent of enterprises use a combination of Microsoft and Oracle software to run their businesses. 

As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, and businesses rely on multiple cloud providers, the partnership makes managing companies’ most important cloud workloads significantly easier. These workloads include financial planning, inventory, sales applications – and their underlying databases.

The expansion will give more customers direct, fast and highly reliable network connectivity between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, while providing first-class customer service and support that enterprises have come to expect from the two companies. This multi-cloud solution delivers the performance, easy integration, rigorous service level agreements, and collaborative enterprise support that they need to simplify their operations. 

Simply put, the Oracle-Microsoft partnership means cloud services run by the two providers will interoperate as if they were part of a single cloud, making it easier for customers to run their mission-critical workloads across the two clouds.

“The global demand for running applications and databases in multi-cloud environments continues to accelerate,” said Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president of engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  “With the new interconnect, our Canadian customers can now take advantage of a nearly seamless cloud integration between the world's largest enterprise cloud providers, Microsoft and Oracle.”

The two companies are putting customers first by enabling them to run full-stack applications side-by-side across clouds, or one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within Oracle Cloud. 

For example, using the interconnect makes it possible to connect Azure services like analytics and AI to Oracle Cloud services like Autonomous Database. Together, Azure and Oracle Cloud offer customers a one-stop shop for all the cloud services and applications they need to run their entire business.

From a technical perspective, the interconnect means less latency or delay, which enables better data transfer and application interaction between clouds. It also supports a broader spectrum of workloads, using resources available on both sides. Accenture recently performed testing on the performance of the interconnect and confirmed that the solution offers customers low latency and high ease of use.

Microsoft and Oracle plan to make the direct interconnect available in additional regions, including on the US West Coast, in a US Government specific region, in Asia, and in the European Union. Earlier this year, Oracle and Microsoft created an interconnect in Ashburn (North America), Azure US East, and in London (United Kingdom).

Schneider Electric releases its initial integrated rack with immersed, liquid-cooled IT for data centers

Schneider Electric, vendor of digital transformation of energy management and automation, with Avnet and Iceotope, announces creation of commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. Optimized for compute-intensive applications, the solution combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope’s liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. 

Avnet integrates the liquid-cooled server with Schneider Electric’s NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system for simple deployment into data centers or edge computing environments. The system is EcoStruxure Ready since the solution is available with next generation data center management software, EcoStruxure IT Expert and our digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor. 

This liquid-cooled solution is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, where high compute demands more energy use. In a recent report published by Gartner, liquid cooling was identified as a technology to watch. 

Analyst Henrique Cecci advised data center operators “maximize cooling energy efficiencies by employing modern liquid cooling solutions.” Liquid cooling offers greater efficiency, lower operating costs, smaller footprint, increased reliability, and nearly silent operation despite the high-power density of the GPUs. 

Avnet, Iceotope and Schneider Electric plan to expand the offering as demand grows by welcoming other server OEMs into the partnership. 

“Schneider Electric is committed to making data centers more sustainable and liquid cooling is a very compelling approach,” said Kevin Brown, CTO and SVP of Innovation, Secure Power, Schneider Electric, who is presenting on liquid cooling at the Gartner conference. “This latest development marks a significant step toward industrializing chassis-based immersion solutions which offer the efficiency and effectiveness of tanks based solutions while providing the compatibility and serviceability of more traditional, ‘direct-to-chip’ liquid-cooling designs. Given the growth of compute-intensive applications, we believe this approach is very promising.”

“As a leading global technology solutions provider, Avnet has always excelled at adapting to changing markets, trends, and technologies,” said Scott MacDonald, global president, Avnet Integrated. “We do well at this by partnering with the world’s best technology designers and hardware manufacturers. In this case, we’re partnering with liquid cooling-specialist, Iceotope, and global infrastructure giant, Schneider Electric, to make the best possible liquid cooling solutions for our customers. We’re excited to integrate, fulfill, and support this solution that smartly addresses customer cooling challenges around rising chip densities, harsh IT environments, rising energy costs, water use restrictions, and space constraints.”

“Iceotope is thrilled to be making its innovative chassis-level, immersive liquid cooling technology available to the general market,” said David Craig, CEO of Iceotope. “We offer the only liquid cooling tech that scales easily from edge computing devices to large server farms in the cloud. And compared to direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems, our approach is more efficient, more reliable, saves more space, eliminates fans, and when deployed across the data center, it lowers cost.”

VirtualWisdom 6.3 enhances infrastructure capacity planning to deepen visibility, simplify capacity management, control costs

Virtana introduced latest version of VirtualWisdom, its hybrid IT infrastructure management and AIOps platform for mission-critical workloads. VirtualWisdom 6.3 is the initial product launch since Virtana’s rebrand in October, and continues the company’s push into capacity management with global storage array analytics, an expanded range of integrations, and new portable reports and dashboards.

Mission-critical hybrid applications combine resources in public clouds, with physical or virtual resources residing in private data centers. For these crucially important workloads, operating at web-scale, managing cost, performance, and capacity has never been more complex or important. 

To gain the insights and operational control that deliver efficient, cost-effective operation, organizations need real-time visibility, automated discovery, AI-powered analytics, and immediate access to best-practice solutions that proactively solve infrastructure-related performance and capacity issues for critical applications.

The VirtualWisdom release features the new Capacity Auditor, a global storage array analytic that offers a unique approach to global capacity management designed to provide app-centric insights and intelligence across hybrid infrastructure and multi-vendor data storage environments. With Capacity Auditor, organizations have a broad view of storage usage and trends across all storage arrays, applications, locations, physical storage assets, and effective capacity.

The VirtualWisdom 6.3 release includes support for Oracle’s Solaris, Red Hat KVM, and Pure Storage solutions that provide all the power of the VirtualWisdom platform to applications using infrastructure within these environments, and management of infrastructure elements that live within them. It also enhances VirtualWisdom’s continuous real-time infrastructure discovery with simple, intuitive dashboards and reports for servers, storage, and networks. Enabling immediate insights into critical relationships between infrastructure elements, visibility into vital statistics, and the capability to automatically apply customizable information sets for identification and cost.

The offering empowers users to share collective insights, dashboards and reports across the VirtualWisdom community. Customers and partners can easily exchange best-practice monitoring reports and visualizations unique to specific environments and applications. Its hybrid, real-time application views make it easy to visualize hybrid applications that cross multiple technology boundaries in one view – including applications that span multiple clouds (AWS, Azure), virtual environments (VMware, KVM, HyperV, PowerVM) as well as physical systems.

VirtualWisdom provides real-time, data-driven lifecycle recommendations to assure performance, speed problem resolution, automate workload optimization, free-up capacity, and ensure resource availability. AI-powered capacity forecasting helps organizations avoid capacity-driven problems before they can happen, and AI-powered workload optimization keeps applications operating within SLAs.

“To provide organizations with a competitive advantage, IT needs to use and manage their resources efficiently. IT professionals need tools to enable them to quickly resolve problems, even as the infrastructure becomes increasingly more complex. They also need to automate as many of the mundane IT tasks as possible,” said George Crump, President and Founder of Storage Switzerland. “Powered by AI/ML capabilities, VirtualWisdom offers recommendations and automated problem resolution, providing customers with deep infrastructure visibility.”

“The Virtana VirtualWisdom platform has been a fundamental enabler of our mission-critical manufacturing technology solutions and services for many years now,” said Todd Weeks, Plex Systems Global VP of Cloud Operations. “Our ability to offer our customers nearly 100% business continuity in a highly efficient cloud infrastructure relies on the real-time infrastructure visibility and AI-powered analytics that are unique to the VirtualWisdom platform.”

“Digital transformation is driving exponential data growth as today’s enterprises must have global visibility into all storage resources to continuously meet these ever-growing demands. Point solutions to managing data sets across multiple vendor storage environments result in highly fragmented, manual and wasteful practices and resources – and can put entire applications at risk,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of Products at Virtana. “With application aware, predictive insight into the underlying digital infrastructure, VirtualWisdom offers the industry’s first and only global infrastructure capacity auditor and forecaster that can providing real-time visibility into mission-critical digital workload infrastructure.”

Broadcom debuts Automation.ai, its AI-driven platform that boosts digital business decision-making and execution

Broadcom has announced availability of Automation.ai, an AI-driven software intelligence platform purpose built to accelerate decision-making across multiple business and technology domains that support digital transformation initiatives. As enterprises increase digital investments, they must contend with increasing complexity and overwhelming volumes of data that slow even simple decision-making. 

Automation.ai correlates and analyzes this data and powers Digital BizOps from Broadcom, a new solution that uses these AI-driven insights to deliver intelligent recommendations—across business and development and operations to transform customer experience, increase employee productivity, improve operational efficiency and speed innovation.

“Digital transformation creates strain and pressure on businesses who need to move more quickly and confidently through the constant change rippling through their organizations,” said Ashok Reddy, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Software Division, Broadcom. “Silos of teams, tools and data impede decision-making. Automation.ai is central to Broadcom’s strategy to leverage AI and automation to create collective intelligence that speeds the informed decision-making critical to achieving digital business success.”

“At Sun Life, we put the client at the center of all we do,” said Barbara Mitchell, assistant vice president, IT Operations, Sun Life Financial, Inc. “As we continue on our digital transformation journey, we are always looking for new ways to harness the power of data. Our partnership with Broadcom will help us take that data and turn it into predictive insights to prevent outages that impact our client experience.”

Automation.ai harnesses the power of advanced machine learning (ML), intelligent automation and internet-scale open source frameworks to transform massive volumes of data from disparate toolsets, providing a unified approach to enterprise decision-making such as AI-driven to provide a predefined and out of box set of AI-driven analysis, correlation, recommendation and remediation services that are fully automated; open to ingest AIOps, DevOps, ValueOps, Automation COE domain data from a full-range of software, including Broadcom, third party and open source.

The offering is Always Learning so that users can continuously validates and improves decisions based on real-world outcomes; extensible so as to operate independently or within existing AI and machine learning ecosystems; and comes multi-cloud with fully containerized Kubernetes-based orchestration on public or private cloud.

AIOps from Broadcom leverages Automation.ai to correlate and analyze a broad range of IT monitoring data sources, and acts as a trusted proof point for the IT Operations analytics offered in Broadcom’s Digital BizOps solution. AIOps from Broadcom now includes new intelligent recommendations and auto-remediation capabilities that help IT teams predict and prevent problems before they impact user experience. 

Its capabilities include SRE DevOps dashboard that provides a new level of DevOps context to Site Reliability Engineers for historic and upcoming releases for production apps; ML-driven Recommendation Engine that provides prescriptions on how to resolve common problems, intelligent actions triggered by Automic Automation, and tribal knowledge recommendations based on customer data; new user journey analysis for flow and funnel visibility for faster triage of customer experience related issues; and enhanced Kubernetes monitoring and Prometheus integration, making it easier to monitor modern applications and infrastructures with smart instrumentation.

In related news, Broadcom recently completed the acquisition of privately-held Terma Software, whose solutions model workload dependencies, optimize workloads, enable intelligent SLAs and improve overall operational efficiency, in real-time. This acquisition will enrich the Automation.ai platform by providing new sources of workload intelligence and analytics to produce actionable insights from multiple vendors.