During its
big customer event in Europe, VMware announced another acquisition to step up
its game in helping enterprises build and run containerised, Kubernetes-based
architectures: it has acquired Heptio, a startup out of Seattle that was
co-founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who were two of the three people who
co-created Kubernetes back at Google in 2014 (it has since been open sourced).
Beda and
McLuckie and their team will all be joining VMware in the transaction.
Terms of the
deal are not being disclosed — VMware said in a release that they are not
material to the company — but as a point of reference, when Heptio last raised
money — a $25 million Series B in 2017, with investors including Lightspeed,
Accel and Madrona — it was valued at $117 million post-money, according to data
from PitchBook.
Given the
pedigree of Heptio’s founders, this is a signal of the big bet that VMware is
taking on Kubernetes, and the belief that it will become an increasing
cornerstone in how enterprises run their businesses. The larger company already
works with 500,000+ customers globally, and 75,000 partners. It’s not clear how
many customers Heptio worked with but they included large, tech-forward
businesses like Yahoo Japan.
It’s also
another endorsement of the ongoing rise of open source and its role in cloud
architectures, a paradigm that got its biggest boost at the end of October with
IBM’s acquisition of RedHat, one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time
at $34 billion.
Heptio
provides professional services for enterprises that are adopting or already use
Kubernetes, providing training, support and building open-source projects for
managing specific aspects of Kubernetes and related container clusters, and
this deal is about VMware expanding the business funnel and margins for
Kubernetes within it its wider cloud, on-premise and hybrid storage and
computing services with that expertise.
“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, in
a statement. “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.”
VMware and its
Pivotal business already offer Kubernetes-related services by way of PKS, which
lets organizations run cloud-agnostic apps. Heptio will become a part of that
wider portfolio.
“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.”
VMware has
made some 33 acquisitions overall, according to Crunchbase, but this appears to
have been the first specifically to boost its position in Kubernetes.
The deal is
expected to close by fiscal Q4 2019, VMware said.
Comments