VMware's Pivotal purchase looks toward a containerized, not virtualized, future

VMware's intent to purchase Pivotal, announced at VMworld 2019, is an important indicator about the future of cloud computing. As the last stalwart proponent of a virtualization-first deployment strategy, the Pivotal purchase and larger embrace of Kubernetes underlies an inevitability most everyone realized in 2016: VMs are old and busted, and containers are where the momentum is. The journey to this point is peculiar, as merger and acquisition stories go VMware and Pivotal are both majority owned by Dell, as part of Dell's purchase of EMC in 2015. Pivotal spun out of VMware in 2012, and subsequently had an IPO at $15 per share in April 2018, and VMware is paying $15 per share to acquire Pivotal. In an interview with ZDNet, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger stated that "Every move that we're making is calculated."