Contact: Brenon Daly
Having built a business valued in the tens of billions of dollars by virtualizing computing, VMware is now using its largest-ever acquisition in an effort to bring virtualization to networking. VMware will hand over a total of $1.26bn for startup Nicira. It’s a significant gamble for VMware, both strategically and financially.
The purchase is more than three times the size of VMware’s next-largest acquisition, and is roughly equal to the amount the virtualization kingpin has spent on its entire M&A program since parent company EMC spun off a small stake in VMware a half-decade ago. (VMware will cover the cost of the purchase from its treasury. As of the end of June, it held $5.3bn in cash and short-term investments, and it has generated $2bn in free cash flow over the past year.)
VMware has positioned Nicira, a company that only recently emerged from stealth, as a key component of its effort to put software at the core of datacenters. VMware has done that with servers – and to some degree, storage as well – by using software to essentially commodify hardware. It’s an approach that appears to undermine a once-cozy relationship with networking partner Cisco Systems. Incidentally, shares of the switch and router giant are currently at their lowest level in about a year, and it announced another round of layoffs at almost exactly the same time that VMware announced its big networking acquisition.
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