The acquisition of Carbon Black by VMware Inc., announced last week, did not come cheap. The price tag was $2.1 billion, but one of VMware’s top executives feel strongly that the company got its money’s worth in the deal.

“We looked at the landscape and felt it was ripe for disruption,” said Sanjay Poonen (pictured), chief operating officer of customer operations at VMware. “What we’re going to do in security is make it intrinsic and take a modern cloud security company — Carbon Black — and make that part of our endpoint security and security analytics strategy. We’re reshaping the entire security industry.”

Poonen spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed options VMware considered before making its bid, the competitive data protection landscape and VMware’s overall enterprise security strategy (see the full interview with transcript here).

Competition among providers

VMware had options for its move into the endpoint security space. One of the other major players was CrowdStrike Inc., which went public in July. It was also the firm that published the initial findings surrounding a Russian breach of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

“The perception in this space is CrowdStrike is number one and Carbon Black is number two,” Poonen said. “That’s OK. There might be a place for multiple vendors.”

However, VMware’s COO indicated that the acquisition of Carbon Black will likely move it into competition with more established security providers.

“Our competition is not just in being an endpoint security tool,” Poonen said. “The place we’re probably going to compete more is with Symantec and McAfee because those companies are kind of decaying assets. They’re not innovating.”

VMware is not the only member of the Dell Technologies Inc. family building a practice in cybersecurity. SecureWorks Inc. and RSA Security LLC also maintain significant positions in the industry. Might VMware be interested in some of the assets those firms could provide?

“Right now, we’ve got enough to digest,” Poonen said. “We got 1,100 people with Carbon Black, and we’re going to build on it. Build, partner and then acquire.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of VMworld 2019:

Photo: SiliconANGLE