
VMware acquires Heptio, the startup founded by 2 co-founders of Kubernetes - kaboro
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/06/vmware-acquires-heptio-the-startup-founded-by-2-co-founders-of-kubernetes/
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andrei821
For me it looks like IBM and VMWare are reinventing themselves trough these
aquisitions. If you work with enterprise customers, you can see how much they
hate these kind of vendors, and how eager they are to understand open-source
solutions,and to adopt the fast pace of internet companies. IBM and VMWare
understood this too, and now they are adapting to this new landscape. I am
confident that when IBM will say to my customers: hey, we can deploy and
support Kubernetes for you (with the same agilty as your existing small
vendors) they will go for it, just to get rid of the bureaucratic burden
generated by their purchasing departments, and us, the small vendors will have
to reinvent as well, and this is how innovation happens.

~~~
basch
Is that any different than

Microsoft - PowerPoint, Hotmail, FrontPage, Windows Live Messenger, Visio,
Bungie, Rare, Lionhead, Mojang, Dynamics (Great Plains, NAV), Skype, Defender,
Perceptive Pixel (Surface Hubs), Yammer, LinkedIn, Acompli (Outlook Mobile),
GitHub, Xamarin, Beam (Mixer)

Facebook - Beluga (Messenger app), Snaptu (Facebook for Every Phone, Facebook
Lite), Instagram, Atlas, Parse, WhatsApp, Occulus, LiveRail (video
monitization)

Adobe - PageMaker, After Effects, Photoshop, FrameMaker, GoLive, Audition,
Echosign (Adobe Sign), Macromedia (who itself acquired Freehand, Dreamweaver,
Flash, ColdFusion), Fireworks, plus its entire Marketing Cloud: Omniture, Day,
Auditude, Neolane, Livefyre, TubeMogul, Magento, Marketo etc

Oracle - ...

the list goes on and on. A lot of these products would not be where they are
today (nor shuttered necessarily) without the resources (or lackthereof)
poured into them after acquisition. Yahoo tried and failed miserably in its
end.

Facebook may be the best example on that list. They get beat to mobile
messenging, they buy Beluga. They lose screen time to mobile devices, they buy
Snaptu. They get beat again to mobile (camera/photo album), they buy
Instagram. The get beat by in messenging AGAIN, and they buy WhatsApp. They
get beat to video by youtube, they buy LiveRail. In a panic to not be beat
again they buy Occulus.

Plus, in this case they are mostly buying the Reputation and Service
Contracts, not as much the product. IBM is already mostly a Service, not
product, company now.

~~~
tedsanders
Google is a great example too. Many of Google’s best-known hits began outside
of Google:

* Maps (maps from Where2 Technologies, acquired in 2004; real-time traffic from ZipDash, acquired in 2004; satellite imagery from Keyhole, acquired in 2005)

* Android (founded in 2003, bought for $50M+ in 2005)

* YouTube (founded in 2005, bought for $1.7B in 2006)

* Adsense (Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003, DoubleClick in 2007, and AdMob for mobile ads in 2009)

* Google Docs (spreadsheets by 2Web, acquired in 2005; docs by Upstartle, acquired in 2006; slides by Tonic Systems, acquired in 2007)

* Waymo (Thrun's team, 510 Systems)

A long list of Alphabet's acquisitions are on Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet)

~~~
basch
Even IBM Cloud is largely built from SoftLayer, Cloudant, Compose, Cleversafe
etc, RedHat fits perflectly with IBMs strategy since 2014.

Interestingly enough, IBM has even left
[https://www.compose.com/](https://www.compose.com/) as a standalone entity
for now.

------
warp_factor
Heptio got a world class team. Congratulations to the founding team. Having
played with and followed the Kubernetes ecosystem for the last couple months,
I'm wondering if this was not all planned:

Find a hot niche market (Kubernetes). Play the "Cool" card on social network,
and hire all the "most famous" Upstream kubernetes contributor (typically
those that tweet a lot). Those newly hired contributors, make the company even
cooler and there is now a perception everywhere that the company is the next
big thing. The product build by the company is not as important as the hype
they got (as shown by the other posts that wonders what they actually do).

At this point, a big business jumps in desperate to get some of the hype
branding for that new market (Kubernetes) and pays big money for what is
essentially a huge acqui-hire (mainly acquiring the Heptio reputation).

This existed before with Openstack, and other similar hype cycles.

------
zenithm
I'm sure everyone involved made some money but aren't they basically a
consultancy?

~~~
segmondy
Really? With all the tools they have written that are open source and on
GitHub?

~~~
zenithm
Are they selling them for money? Or are they just things useful in the
consulting process and a way to create awareness for the company?

The website advertises professional services, training, support subscriptions,
and books. Redhat model I guess.

------
pm90
Surprised to see them get acquired so soon.

> Terms of the deal are not being disclosed — VMware said in a release that
> they are not material to the company

Can we make an intelligent guess about the upper bound of the transaction?
i.e. would it have to be < $500 million? < $1 Billion?

~~~
fizx
IIRC, public companies have to disclose above $84MM, though perhaps not
immediately.

~~~
jkaplowitz
The threshold of required disclosure is based on what's material to the public
company involved. This is an accounting concept that scales up as the company
is bigger. But sure for many companies $84MM would be material.

------
tyingq
Curious what the relationship will be like with Pivotal now. It would be a
little odd if Vmware makes something that competes with PKS.

~~~
voor
Pivotal is amped up and excited about the acquisition. Check out @rseroter’s
Tweet:
[https://twitter.com/rseroter/status/1059738266189017088?s=09](https://twitter.com/rseroter/status/1059738266189017088?s=09)

~~~
tyingq
I saw that, but also saw this on Heptio's blog post about the announcement:

 _" Heptio’s mission is to build a platform that accelerates IT in a multi-
cloud world."_

Just feels like some overlap with PKS, and both companies being Dell owned is
interesting.

~~~
AlphaSite
I mean PKS is vmware and pivotal co-developed.

------
willejs
Did Heptio do some consulting for Amazon AWS? They have a guest blog post from
memory, and im wondering if they helped kickstart EKS? Obviously they built
aws-iam-authenticator, and as a company worked with AWS services... I would
have thought Amazon acquiring them would have made way more sense?

~~~
discodave
In general, Amazon doesn't aqui-hire as much as some other tech gians. They
acquire things instead of spending CapEx (Whole Foods), to vertically
integrate (Annapurna Labs), or things with very good customer bases, and
brands (Twitch, Zappos).

Heptio had none of these.

EKS seems like more of an "OK, fine, if you really want K8s, you can have K8s"
move to me.

------
jacques_chester
Congratulations to everyone at Heptio!

~~~
supergirl
funny how these days if your company is acquired it is cause for celebration.

~~~
beatgammit
Why. It's a chance to cash out, which is usually a great thing!

~~~
acct1771
Not for the user/consumer, usually.

This industry used to mean something.

------
nunez
Kubernetes companies are like the chat apps of 2018. Unlike chat apps,
Kubernetes has yet to gain a serious foothold in large numbers. These
acquisitions feel like FOMO.

~~~
Thaxll
Except everyone is using Kubernetes.

~~~
kraig
What major tech companies are using Kubernetes?

~~~
swozey
GoldmanSachs, CapitalOne, Comcast, Hauwei, Ebay, IBM, Intel, Redhat,
DigitalOcean, ING, JD.com, Monzo, NYT, SAP, Squarespace, Blackrock, Box,
Wikimedia

Scroll down to Case studies; [https://kubernetes.io/case-
studies/](https://kubernetes.io/case-studies/) \- there are far more large
corps using it that aren't listed on this of course. I'll let them toot their
horns if they'd like. :)

Also, as I work with k8s I like to watch the trend of HNs "Who's hiring?"
threads out of curiosity and I ctrl-f for kubernetes/k8s. Last few times I've
looked 20-25+ have had kubernetes in their postings. It's been a pretty fair
chunk / near-majority over the last 6 months or so.

It's a marked difference from when I got on the kubernetes train around 2015,
that's for sure!

