VMware Set To Take Over Heptio

VMware, a major player in the virtualization and the cloud industry, recently announced at the VMworld 2018, which is held in Europe, that it has finalized a deal which will help it with the acquisition of Heptio, a company leading in the open Kubernetes ecosystem. However, the terms and conditions concerning the deal remain undisclosed.

Heptio was founded just two years ago, in 2016, by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who also happen to be the founders of the famous Kubernetes. The company has, since then, working on improving Kubernetes. Heptio has raised a total of $33.5M in funding. Their latest funding was raised on Sep 13, 2017 from a Series B round.

This will, in turn, help Heptio open new opportunities for VMware to give something to the open source community which can help it upstream Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes is emerging as an open framework for multi-cloud infrastructure that enables enterprise organizations to run modern applications,” said Paul Fazzone, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Native Apps Business Unit, VMware. “Heptio products and services will reinforce and extend VMware’s efforts with PKS to establish Kubernetes as the de facto standard for infrastructure across clouds upon closing. We are thrilled that the Heptio team led by Craig and Joe will be joining VMware to help us guide customers as they move to a multi-cloud world.”

“The team at Heptio has been focused on Kubernetes, creating products that make it easier to manage multiple clusters across multiple clouds,” said Craig McLuckie, CEO and co-founder of Heptio. “And now we will be tapping into VMware’s cloud-native resources and proven ability to execute, amplifying our impact. VMware’s interest in Heptio is a recognition that there is so much innovation happening in open source. We are jointly committed to contribute even more to the community—resources, ideas, and support.”

The acquisition of Heptio is not going to have a substantial impact on VMware's next year's fiscal results. The acquisition is in the line with the recent trend among big players to endorse open source business models and technologies. Recently IBM acquired RedHat for USD $32 Billion to grow its hybrid cloud offerings.

“Heptio has an incredibly talented team and exciting portfolio of products that will expand and accelerate Pivotal and VMware’s customers’ journey with cloud native software upon closing. VMware and Pivotal have worked together to co-develop PKS which enables enterprises to more effectively build and run modern applications. We are thrilled for Heptio to join VMware and look forward to working with them to drive greater innovation together,” said Ian Andrews, senior vice president, products and marketing, Pivotal.

VMware and Pivotal are responsible for the delivery of PKS, which is known to be the most comprehensive portfolio, helping customers with the on-premises development of Kubernetes. Heptio is known for its proven expertise and leadership in Kubernetes and will only result in the tighter integration of Kubernetes in the enterprise environment.

It is expected that the acquisition process will be completed in the fourth quarter of 2019,  VMware said.