VMware Acquires Bitnami, Growing Ability to Deliver Apps to the Multi-Cloud
Packaging apps in a way that makes it easy to install and manage is one of the hallmarks of Bitnami. In recent years, the company has increasingly focussed on container, Kubernetes and multi-cloud technologies which has made it increasingly useful for enterprise organizations.
On May 15, VMware announced that it is acquiring Bitnami, furthering VMware's own cloud native ambitions. Financial terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed. Bitnami is a privately-held organization that was raised $1.1 million from YCombinator and has largely been bootstrapped.
“Over the past years, we expanded our focus to help enterprises use Bitnami in production, often as part of a migration of their application to the cloud or their adoption of Kubernetes,” Bitnami's founders wrote in a blog post. “We realized that, if we wanted to continue to grow, we would have to raise money, as building an enterprise salesforce is not easy to do when you are bootstrapped.”
As Bitnami looked at different options, it became apparent that VMware was an ideal partner as both have a shared interest in seeing Kubernetes grow.
“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,” VMware wrote in a blog announcing the deal. “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.”
The acquisition of Bitnami will expand VMware's already robust cloud native and Kubernetes product portfolio. VMware acquired Kubernetes startup Heptio in November 2018.
Bitnami Products
Bitnami's portfolio has its application catalog at the core, which enables organization large and small to easily deploy a complete application stack. No modern application is ever a single technology and typically involves multiple components. For example, a WordPress blog requires a user to have a database and the PHP programming language installed as prerequisites.
A step up from the regular application catalog is the Bitnami Enterprise Catalog, which is an enterprise repository of supported open source applications for organizations
The Bitnami Stacksmith offering is all about helping organization to build and maintain application package that can be delivered to multiple clouds.
Kubernetes is a core area of expertise for Bitnamia with the company's Kubeapps effort, which came from the acquisition of Skippbox in March 2017. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that has gained wide adoption for both on-premises and cloud deployment of applications. Kubeapps enables organization to deploy and mange applications in a seamless way into a Kubernetes cluster.
While some organizations already have Kubernetes deployments, or use a managed service, the Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR) is a stack that can help enable new Kubernetes cluster deployments, as well as adding value to existing installations.
In the short term, Bitnami's founders don't expect anything to change for customers.
“So what does it mean for you, our users and partners? In a way, nothing is changing,” the Bitnami founders wrote. ” We will continue to develop and maintain our application catalog across all the platforms we support and even expand to additional ones.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
