Companies can accomplish a lot more if they work together. There’s more satisfaction for customers, staff members get access to additional assistance and resources, and each venture can build stronger relationships with the others’ clientele.

In the case of Bitnami Inc. and VMware Inc., two companies that have been working together for nearly a decade, the decision for VMware to acquire Bitnami earlier this month will help broaden its multicloud strategy. VMware is already a provider to many of Bitnami’s customers, and the acquisition will allow both companies to remain intact, continuing to offer their services to customers, according to Daniel Lopez Ridruejo (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Bitnami.

Ridruejo spoke with Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host and cloud economist Corey Quinn during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Barcelona. They discussed the strategy behind VMware’s acquisition of Bitnami and what customers can expect once the acquisition is finished (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s Note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Quinn: Bitnami is being acquired by VMware. What is the long-term vision for how this will fit into a more cloud-native landscape? Is it continuing to be an application? Are there containerized stories? Is there something I’m not seeing?

Ridruejo: Well, [being an application] is all part of the core of Bitnami, and we’ll continue to do that. What has evolved over time is that you can download an installer and run it on your Mac, and then we are one of the first early adopters of AWS. A lot of people thought we were crazy. Amazon was a company that sold books, but we saw where it was going early on. And when Kubernetes came along, we were there as well.

We were also one of the early partners of Helm, and we also work with serverless, so whatever comes next, we’ll be there. We’ll also do some of the same things, which is to make awesome software that’s available to everyone, and that’s primarily what we’re focusing on. The core mission isn’t changing; we’re just adding more of an enterprise, more multi-tier, and more production features.

Miniman: You talk about Linux and all these pieces. How does all this tie into VMware? What do you see them doing today, because there’s been a lot of competition between VMware and Linux?

Ridruejo: Yeah, there are couple of different companies on VMware, like Microsoft, that were completely different five years ago. For us, with VMware, the holy grail of the acquisition is two-plus-two equals five. There are a lot of acquisitions that don’t go that way, but for us, it was a very thought-out decision. And it was clear for us in the sense that we have a very big footprint with developers. [VMware] owns enterprise IT; they wanted to go into enterprise, and they wanted to go into developers and distributed teams.

Miniman: Once this [acquisition] does close, what will that mean for the brand? How does everything line up?

Ridruejo: We’re working on several different initiatives, and we’re just going to double-down on that. [VMware] wants to keep Bitnami. They want to keep the team, so if anything, that’s just going to give us more resources because they don’t want to touch something that’s already working. We have been partners for, I think, seven or eight years. We’ve really gotten to know each other over that time, and we’ve built the trust that is needed.

In a way, nothing is going to change. We’re going to have the same team doing the same thing. We’re just going to have more access to their user base. Originally, we were raising money to build this enterprise salesforce, and we eventually decided that that didn’t make sense. We were going to give away a chunk of the company to get access to enterprise when, really, we could just be part of VMware and get enterprise for free.

Quinn: What does this mean for your existing customers?

Ridruejo: What’s unique is that we have millions of users, but we only have a handful of customers. And VMware is already a vendor to most of them. So really not much is going to change for them. Everyone is going to stay, and that’s one of the things that made this acquisition so attractive. For our customers, nothing is going to change, and we’re just going to deepen those relationships. That’s very important.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.  (* Disclosure: This segment is unsponsored. Red Hat Inc. is the headline sponsor for theCUBE’s live broadcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Neither Red Hat nor any other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE