VMware Agrees to Buy Carbon Black for About $2 Billion

Andrew Martin, Bloomberg News

MEYRIN, SWITZERLAND - APRIL 19: A detailed view in the CERN Computer / Data Centre and server farm of the 1450 m2 main room during a behind the scenes tour at CERN, the World's Largest Particle Physics Laboratory on April 19, 2017 in Meyrin, Switzerland. Experiments at CERN generate colossal amounts of data (the LHC experiments produce over 30 petabytes of data per year). The Data Centre stores it, and sends it around the world for analysis. Archiving the vast quantities of data is an essential function at CERN. CERN has more than 130 Petabytes of stored data (the equivalent of 700 years of full HD-quality movies). CERN does not have the computing or financial resources to crunch all of the data on site, so in 2002 it turned to grid computing to share the burden with computer centres around the world. The centre maintains disk and tape servers, which need to be upgraded regularly. (Photo by Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images) , Getty Images

(Bloomberg) -- VMware Inc. agreed to purchase Carbon Black Inc. for about $2 billion, adding cybersecurity services to its data-center software offerings.

VMware said it will pay $26 a share in cash for Waltham, Massachusetts-based Carbon Black, giving the target company an enterprise value of $2.1 billion. VMware, based in Palo Alto, California, is majority-owned by Dell Technologies Inc.

Once the deal is complete, VMware, which makes virtualization and networking tools, said it would be positioned to provide “highly differentiated, intrinsic security cloud” through big data, behavioral analytics and artificial intelligence.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. acted as financial adviser to VMware on the deal.

--With assistance from Jim Silver.

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Martin in New York at amartin146@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr, Andrew Pollack