Guest post by Broadcom has confirmed it intends to acquire VMware in a deal that looks set to be worth $61 billion, if it goes ahead: the agreement provides for a “go-shop” provision under which the virtualization giant may solicit alternative offers.
That “go-shop” provision:
However, the merger agreement has a “go-shop” provision under which VMware may seek alternative offers from other interested parties and potentially enter negotiations with them during the next 40 days.
VMware has a backup, maybe?
Broadcom is a weird one to buy VMware, but it makes some sort of sense. Broadcom make chips which are widely used, specifically networking equipment, and baking VMware support into their chips is probably the value proposition, or vice versa. Let’s see what happens. I would think another company (Microsoft, IBM, or Cisco?) would be interested in VMware enough to top the $61 billion Broadcom has on the table.
Who knew VMWare was worth $61b? vSphere is cool and stuff, but nothing that a well-funded team of programmers (definitely under $1b) can’t replicate.
I agree, but the price probably isn’t for the technology, but rather the customer base. Without established customers the valuation of companies like facebook would plummet.
VMWare actually makes most of their money with enterprise hypervisors. They’re usually the ones pushing out stuff that later Microsoft and Xen/AWS’ port of Xen end up copying, and were on the forefront of on-premises hypervisor automation technology, so it makes a lot of sense, they have some seriously insane technology under them for anyone setting up their own cloud business.
This merger supposedly will make their licenses no longer be “perpetual” though, so it’s a big change, hope Broadcom does not destroy the company and customer base, I know some people would rather switch to Hyper-V or Xen and do a lot themselves.