(Editor’s Note: This week, Tom Petrocelli and Hyoun Park will be blogging and tweeting on key topics at VMworld at a time when multi-cloud management is a key issue for IT departments and Dell is spending billions of dollars. Please follow our blog and our twitter accounts TomPetrocelli, Hyounpark, and AmalgamInsights for more details this week as we cover VMworld!)
As Amalgam Insights prepares to attend VMworld, it is an especially interesting time from both an M&A and a strategic perspective as VMware completes acquisitions of its sibling company Pivotal and end-user security startup Carbon Black. As these acquisitions are in progress and Amalgam Insights has the opportunity to question executives at the top of Dell Technologies, including Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell, Amalgam Insights will be looking forward to answers to the following questions:
1. How will VMware accelerate Pivotal’s growth post-acquisition? Back in 2013 when Pivotal was first founded, I stated in an interview that
The potential for Pivotal was immense. Even in light of The Death of Big Data, Pivotal still has both the toolkits and methodology to support intelligent analytic and algorithm-based application architectures at a time when VMware needs to increase its support there in light of the capabilities of IBM-Red Hat, Oracle, and other competitors. We’re looking forward to getting some answers!
2. How will the Carbon Black acquisition be integrated into VMware’s security and end-user computing offerings? Carbon Black is a Boston-area security startup focused on discovering malicious activity on endpoints and will be a strong contributor to WorkspaceONE as VMware seeks to manage and secure the mobile-cloud ecosystem. And along with NSX Cloud for networking and CloudHealth Technologies for multi-cloud management, Carbon Black will help VMware to tell a stronger end-to-end cloud story. But the potential and timeline for integration will end up defining the success of this 2 billion+ dollar acquisition.
3. Where does CloudHealth Technologies fit into VMware’s multi-cloud management story? Although this 500 million dollar acquisition looked promising when it occurred last year, the Dell family previously invested in Enstratius to manage multi-cloud environments and that acquisition ended up going nowhere. What did VMware learn from the last time around and how will CloudHealth Technologies stay top of mind with all these other acquisitions going on?
4. Where is VMware going with its machine learning and AI capabilities for data center management? I can’t take credit for this one, as the great Maribel Lopez brought this up (go ahead and follow her on LinkedIn!). But VMware needs to continue advancing the Software-Defined Data Center and to ease client challenges in supporting hybrid cloud environments.
5. How is VMware bringing virtualization and Kubernetes together? With VMware’s acquisitions of Heptio and Bitnami, VMware has put itself right in the middle of the Kubernetes universe. But virtualization and Kubernetes are the application support equivalent of data center and cloud, two axes on the spectrum of what is possible. How will VMware simplify this componentization for clients who are seeking hybrid cloud help?
We’ll be looking for answers to these questions and more as we roam the halls of Moscone and put VMware and Dell executives to the test! Stay tuned for more!