VMWare to Acquire Bitnami

Organizations today are on a multi-cloud journey, and VMware is committed to investing in solutions that address the core needs of our customers. In that spirit, VMware is announcing its intent to acquire Bitnami , a leader in application packaging solutions providing the largest catalog of click-to-deploy applications and development stacks for major cloud and Kubernetes environments. (Read Bitnami’s blog post on today’s news).

Applications form the building blocks of modern business—developing applications rapidly, efficiently, and with customer-centricity help organizations differentiate in their industries and gain competitive advantages. Bitnami enables this by providing the latest versions of validated and highly secure application packages—many of them from open source ISVs—that enable developers to hit the ground running when building new applications and services on any cloud. Bitnami’s strong developer community has leveraged its robust application catalog to build millions of applications. Upon close, we will continue to invest in Bitnami’s suite of products and projects as well as help our customers to build and deploy applications more quickly and easily.

Bitnami’s Impact on VMware

At VMware, we are increasingly enabling our customers for a multi-cloud world across three primary vectors:

• Delivering VMware Cloud Foundation as a product and service globally—ourselves and via our VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) ecosystem;
• Enabling customers to adopt native cloud services while helping them with management, security and operations at large scale with CloudHealth; and,
• Delivering the Kubernetes capabilities in the infrastructure framework to modernize existing and build new cloud native applications with ease.

Upon close, Bitnami will enable our customers to easily deploy application packages on any cloud— public or hybrid—and in the most optimal format—virtual machine (VM), containers and Kubernetes helm charts. Further, Bitnami will be able to augment our existing efforts to deliver a curated marketplace to VMware customers that offers a rich set of applications and development environments in addition to infrastructure software.

Solving Challenges for Customer Developer and IT Operations Teams

Our goal is to accelerate the application “builder’s journey” by delivering simplified ways to leverage open source software applications and frameworks; and free the “builders” to focus on building differentiated capabilities versus worrying about deployment and infrastructure. We plan to do this across all clouds and formats—VMs, containers and SaaS offerings. Our goal will be to provide equivalency not abstraction across the different cloud platforms.

For enterprise IT, we intend to solve for challenges related to taking a core set of application packages and making them available consistently across teams and clouds. After close, our solution will be designed to allow enterprise IT to provide a customized catalog that: adheres to their security best practices, delivers up-to-date content, is multi-cloud validated, features rich usage analytics, and more.

By bridging these two domains, we will enable developers to move with agility while IT operations teams will have the needed controls in place in this fast-moving world.

Increasing Collaboration with ISVs

For ISVs that have their sights set on being available in multiple environments, it is increasingly challenging to build and validate solutions for major cloud and Kubernetes environments. Bitnami has long offered packaged applications as VMs, cloud images and containers to help developers run software wherever needed. Upon close, we plan to work with ISVs on multiple fronts:

• Help deliver their validated solution onto multiple clouds, in multiple formats and in multiple marketplaces. Bitnami has the automated tools to pick up the latest versions of ISV software, package and deploy automatically to cloud marketplaces.
• Enable simplified acquisition/commerce across any cloud. This extends to open source software vendors who offer a support/paid version of their software.
• Extend our cloud-native apps strategy by adding expertise to package and deliver ISV software for Kubernetes; further helping our customers get the most out of Kubernetes, regardless of where and how they choose to operate it.

Extending Cloud Service Provider Engagements

We are committed to maintaining the deep partnerships that Bitnami currently has with major cloud service providers today after close. And we plan to continue to drive rich content to their marketplaces to enable the best experience for our mutual customers.

This will also be an opportunity for VMware’s existing Managed Service Provider (MSP) and VMware-based Cloud Service Provider (CSP) partners to provide Bitnami’s application content to their end customers, and deliver value beyond infrastructure to help their customers with their respective digital transformation journeys.

Fostering Deeper Community Ties

It is vital that we work together with our ISVs, technology partners, channels, and others, to deliver the best customer experience. After close, we will continue to offer Bitnami services to the end user directly and drive further adoption via our partner communities. By providing paths for developers to use supported versions of open source software packages, and enabling the “builder’s journey” across multiple clouds, we aim to drive greater adoption and awareness of the work we do as a community.

We look forward to welcoming the Bitnami team to VMware. We’re excited about what we will be able to achieve with the combination of Bitnami and VMware. For additional perspective, read Shekar Ayyar’s blog post .