GEC NEWS WIREVMware completed its acquisition of Carbon Black, a leader in cloud-native endpoint protection, in an all-cash transaction for $26 per share, representing an enterprise value of $2.1 billion.
“Carbon Black brings us an industry-leading endpoint and workload security platform, with a cloud-native architecture, an AI-powered data lake and a smart, lightweight agent,” said Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer, Customer Operations, VMware. “The Carbon Black platform, along with VMware NSX, VMware Workspace ONE, VMware Secure State and our future innovations, will deliver a highly-differentiated intrinsic security platform across network, endpoint, workload, identity, cloud and analytics. We believe this will bring a fundamentally new paradigm to the security industry.”
With the close of the acquisition, VMware is launching a new Security Business Unit within the company. Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley will be serving as the general manager of this new group reporting to Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer, Customer Operations, VMware. Carbon Black will form the nucleus of VMware’s Security offering, focused on helping VMware customers with advanced cybersecurity protection, and in-depth behavioral insight to help stop sophisticated attacks and accelerate response.
“From the beginning, Carbon Black has been all about collecting and analyzing key endpoint data to understand attacker behaviors, and help make our customers more resilient against advanced cyberattacks,” said Patrick Morley, general manager, Security Business Unit, VMware. “Joining VMware helps us reach a broader range of organizations, and enables us to build security into the underlying fabric of the compute stack. We are thrilled to join forces as we further our vision of creating a world safe from cyberattacks and see and stop modern attacks.”
Under the terms of the transaction, which was structured as a cash tender offer, Carbon Black shareholders who validly tendered (and did not properly withdraw) their shares in Carbon Black, received $26 per share in cash, representing an enterprise value of $2.1 billion. The transaction was funded through cash on the balance sheet, and by accessing short-term borrowing capacity.
