VMWare acquires Heptio in enterprise Kubernetes adoption push
VMWare has announced the acquisition of Heptio in a bid to ramp up the adoption of Kubernetes services in the enterprise.
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On Tuesday at the VMworld 2018 Europe summit in Barcelona, the tech giant said that Heptio will "open new channels for VMware to further engage the open-source community and harden upstream Kubernetes as well as support the cloud-native needs of the largest enterprises in the world."
Financial details were not disclosed.
Founded in 2016 by two of the creators of Kubernetes, Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, Heptio is a contributor to the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, and the technology's deployment by organizations.
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The company, which has previously secured a total of $33.5 million through two funding rounds, also offers enterprise players consultancy and training services for Kubernetes.
Heptio's Kubernetes solutions are destined to join the VMWare Kubernetes PKS portfolio, created in conjunction with Pivotal, which the companies say is the "most comprehensive Kubernetes portfolio covering customer use cases for on-premises deployment and as a cloud service."
"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 of the Cloud Native Apps Business Unit at VMware. "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."
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In a blog post, Heptio said the deal was agreed due to the "shared vision" of both companies. The company said:
"We are on the precipice of a major transformation -- the decoupling of applications from the environments where they are run. And we feel a responsibility to help organizations navigate this transformation to true cloud-native architecture.
To realize the greatest possible impact, Heptio would need access to an entirely different level of resources and execution capabilities than we have today."
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The transaction is expected to close in Q4 2019, subject to regulatory approval. While the sales figure has not been released at present, VMWare added that the acquisition is not predicted to have a "material impact" on FY 2019 results.
In related news at VMWorld Europe, the company announced an accelerated rollout of VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as updates to the software-defined data center (SDDC) platform Cloud Foundation.