As VMware’s CEO since 2012, Pat Gelsinger has overseen more than 30 mergers and acquisitions (M&A). He arrived at the virtualization giant the same month it reached a deal to buy Nicira, which, a year later, birthed the wildly successful NSX networking platform. And yesterday during his VMworld keynote, Gelsinger announced an agreement to acquire SaltStack, a developer-focused, open-source automation platform.

VMware’s made seven M&A deals this year alone (so far), and Gelsinger’s not shy about discussing his company’s appetite for scooping up smaller companies. “Some of them are going to be great bargain-basement buys for us to do acquisitions,” he said at the Bank of America 2020 Global Technology Conference when asked about smaller tech companies weathering the pandemic-induced economic upheaval.

But when asked at VMworld to say which areas of VMware’s portfolio he plans to grow via M&A, as opposed to partnerships or developing the technology in house, he deadpanned: “If I really answered that, I’d have to shoot you.”

Still, he gave a few hints at what types of M&A targets we can expect in the future. Cloud and developer-focused software companies top the list.

VMware started buying Kubernetes and container startups in 2018. It paid $550 million for Heptio, whose founders Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie both worked as engineers at Google on the platform that eventually became the open source Kubernetes project. Just days before last year’s VMworld, Gelsinger announced that VMware would pay $2.7 billion for Pivotal. And at the event he launched the company’s Kubernetes portfolio called Tanzu.

“In addition to what we’re doing with Tanzu, we’re announcing partnership to see [Tanzu] with Cloudian and MinIO, and HashiCorp and GitLab, and Confluent, and so on,” Gelsinger said. “So a lot of partnerships in the software developer area. Some of those could become acquisition areas.”

In addition to software development platforms, Gelsinger pointed to security companies as potential VMware M&A targets. Security is another one of VMware’s newer business units. The vendor launched its initial standalone security product, AppDefense, in 2017 with Carbon Black as a partner. Then last year, in the lead up to VMworld 2019, VMware bought Carbon Black for $2.1 billion to anchor its security business.

VMware is now a $1 billion security business with its C-suite set on growing to a multi-billion-dollar security company. Earlier this year it bought Lastline, which adds network detection and response to its security arsenal and boosts its position in the emerging extended detection and response (XDR) space. It also acquired Octarine, a container security startup, which is another area where VMware sees major growth potential.

Although VMware chose to partner with cloud security vendors Zscaler and Menlo Security to round out its secure access service edge (SASE) platform, that doesn’t rule out an acquisition down the road. “You can clearly see that we’re going to bring more into that [SASE] solution, and there could be M&A in that area as well,” Gelsinger said.

During his keynote, Gelsinger said SaltStick would bolster VMware’s vRealize cloud management and automation portfolio. And over the summer, VMware acquired True Visibility to boost analytics and visibility within that portfolio after partnering with True Visibility owner Blue Medora for years. But VMware’s not yet finished with this technology, Gelsinder said.

“We’ve been building out more and more of our cloud and automation solutions, and I don’t think we’re ever done in the management and automation area for either organic or inorganic innovation,” he said. “Customers don’t want all these bespoke tools, or … a complex set of things that to go manage.”

Automation software simplifies customers’ hybrid environments, he added, “and that’s the mantra. We’re bringing in more and more of those use cases for security, end-user computing, and workload and application management into a complete automated solution stack from VMware.”

“So I’d say those three areas in particular, but we’ve also seen some of the telco-related acquisitions to focus more on that vertical,” Gelsinger continued, noting VMware’s Uhana buy last year. Uhana’s platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate network operations and VMware uses this technology to support 5G deployments.

“I could certainly see more things happening in that [telco] area as well, and some of the other solution areas as we build more capacity in health care, financial services, public sector as well,” Gelsinger said.

In other words, stay tuned, and look for more M&A to come.