VMware buys Bitnami, targets cloud and enterprise app stores

VMware has announced it will acquire Bitnami for an undisclosed sum.

Bitnami packages enterprise applications to make them easy to deploy in the cloud. The company is relevant to the channel in two ways.

One is that it can be used by MSPs that operate clouds to create click-to-install application catalogues that bring independent clouds closer to the marketplace experiences offered by hyperscale clouds. The other is that Bitnami helps ISVs to package their wares for easier deployment.

VMware has done business with Bitnami since around 2015, when the pair teamed to build a marketplace-like experience in VMware’s first cloud – the now-defunct vCloud Air.

Clearly the two got on well!

VMware’s Milin Desai and Paul Fazzone wrote that the deal creates “… an opportunity for VMware’s existing 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.”

The pair also talked up a plan 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.”

That marketplace could be on a cloud, or perhaps on-prem as the post says buying Bitnami means that “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.”

The main win, however, is that VMware gains another application-packaging option to go with its expertise on virtual machines or containers.

“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,” the pair wrote. “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.”

Bitnami’s “we got bought!” blog post signaled an enterprise push.

“Joining forces with VMware means that we will be able to both double-down on the breadth and depth of our current offering and bring Bitnami to even more clouds as well as accelerating our push into the enterprise,” wrote co-founders Daniel Lopez and Erica Brescia.

“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,” the pair wrote.

VMware has cash. Plenty of it. So watch this space - it won't be long before the the company starts talking about the importance of enterprise application catalogs that can send workloads to any cloud while preserving security and network