VMware Inc.’s latest acquisition is Bitnami Inc., a prominent name in the developer ecosystem that provides ready-to-use versions of popular open-source applications.

The terms of the deal, which was announced this morning, were not disclosed. San Francisco-based Bitnami is profitable and has raised just $1.1 million in outside funding from a group of investors that included Y Combinator.

Bitnami operates a free library of open-source applications that have each been optimized by its engineers to work on multiple types of infrastructure. Developers can quickly deploy them on their laptops, in popular public clouds, on their companies’ internal servers or a hybrid environment. Some of the applications in Bitnami’s catalog, such as WordPress, also come bundled with additional components.

The startup claims that its prepackaged software has been used in millions of development projects to date. Bitnami makes money through Bitnami Enterprise Catalog, a commercial version of its library that adds on features such as vulnerability scanning and automatic updates. The startup also offers a second product called Stacksmith that can be used to create custom application packages.

Erica Brescia, Bitnami’s chief operating officer, dropped by SiliconANGLE’s theCube studio (below) shortly after Stacksmith launched last year. She explained that the offering “allows enterprise IT departments to package up their own applications, both for cloud and cloud-native platforms as well as whatever they’re running in the enterprise [data center] today.”

Bitnami’s focus on simplifying application delivery in multicloud environments aligns well with VMware’s strategy. The company has made its on-premises infrastructure management tools available on Amazon Web Services. Last month it revealed plans to bring them to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure as well.

The Bitnami acquisition should enable VMware to move up the stack and take on a bigger role in customers’ application environments. “Our goal is to accelerate the application ‘builder’s journey’ by delivering simplified ways to leverage open source software applications and frameworks,” VMware executives Milin Desai and Paul Fazzone wrote in a blog post.

“We would expect VMware to maintain Bitnami’s ‘Switzerland’ positioning across all stacks and public clouds post the acquisition,” Barclays Capital Inc. analyst Raimo Lenschow wrote in a note to clients.

VMware will keep the free version of Bitnami’s application library accessible for developers after the acquisition completes. Desi and Fazzone stressed that the solutions in the catalog will continue to support all the cloud platforms they work with today.

Photo: Bitnami