VMware is expanding into mobile security and the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend with planned acquisition of privately held Airwatch, announced Wednesday morning.
VMware is offering $1.175 billion in cash plus another $365 million of “installment payments and assumed unvested equity” for Airwatch, an 11-year-old, Atlanta-based company that’s still privately held. The deal would be fueled by VMware’s cash (of which there’s $5.8 billion available, as of October’s earnings report) and some debt provided by parent company EMC.
Airwatch’s team would apparently remain intact under the deal, continuing to report to CEO John Marshall. Airwatch would be folded into VMware’s End User Computing Group under Executive Vice President Sanjay Poonen. There, it would join Destktone, the “desktop-as-a-service” company that VMware acquired in October.
VMware expects to close the deal by March 31.
VMware has been expanding beyond server virtualization into the personal space with offerings like its Horizon Suite for mobility. With Airwatch, VMware adds the tools for enterprises to manage security for mobile devices, apps, and content, which could let VMware extend the workspace “from desktop, to laptop, to tablet, to phone, to car,” as Poonen notes in a blog post published Wednesday. They even made him record a video about it:
As part of the same announcement, VMware noted it had a pretty good fourth quarter. Revenues came out to $1.48 billion, according to preliminary results; that’s at the high end of VMware’s earlier forecast and beats the analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.47 billion, according to Bloomberg.
