Virtualization and cloud infrastructure giant VMWare (NYSE: VMW) announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire endpoint security firm Carbon Black (NASDAQ: CBLK) in a deal representing an enterprise value of $2.1 billion.
Following the close of the all-cash transaction for $26 per share, VMWare says that Carbon Black’s solutions will be combined with VMware’s security offerings, including AppDefense, Workspace ONE, NSX and SecureState, and provide a security cloud platform for any application, running on any cloud, on any device.
Founded in 2002, Carbon Back was initially called Bit9, but in 2016, two years after a merger with Carbon Black, it officially adopted the name Carbon Black. The list of Carbon Black acquisitions includes Objective Logistics, VisiTrend, and Confer Technologies.
With more than 5,600 customers and 500 partners globally, Carbon Black’s endpoint security solutions include application control, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and next-generation antivirus capabilities.
“We now have the opportunity to seamlessly integrate Carbon Black’s cloud-native endpoint protection platform into all of VMware’s control points,” said Patrick Morley, CEO, Carbon Black, noting that VMware has more than 500,000 customers and more than 70 million virtual machines around the world.
“The security industry is broken and ineffective with too many fragmented solutions and no cohesive platform architecture. By bringing Carbon Black into the VMware family, we are now taking a huge step forward in security and delivering an enterprise-grade platform to administer and protect workloads, applications and networks,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware.
Carbon Black will exist as an independent business unit within VMware, and all existing agreements between Carbon Black and its customers and partners are not impacted by the deal, Morley said.
The transaction is expected to close in the second half of VMware’s fiscal year 2020, ending January 31, 2020.