VMware buys CloudVolumes for real-time desktop app delivery
Summary: Buying the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company enables VMware to build real-time application delivery across all three of its technology focus areas. — Virtualization powerhouse VMware announced that it has acquired CloudVolumes …
Context & Ripple Effects
VMware's purchase of Santa Clara-based CloudVolumes is a classic tuck-in: a small capability acquisition meant to add real-time application delivery across the company's three technology focus areas, with the desktop and virtualization businesses named as the immediate beneficiaries. The deal landed under Pat Gelsinger, who took over as CEO from Paul Maritz in 2012, and drew unusually wide pickup for an unpriced startup buy — VMware's own End-User Computing blog and Office of the CTO ran it alongside PC World, Gigaom, SiliconANGLE, The Register, eWeek and Business Cloud News.
The acquisition also fits a pattern the corpus already documents: when VMware bought Nicira for software-defined networking, Cisco responded by acquiring vCider, showing that VMware's platform-layer buys reliably force competitive responses. CloudVolumes extends that playbook from networking into the desktop application-delivery layer.
First-order effects
- VMware gains in-house real-time application delivery technology, letting it serve Windows apps to virtual desktops without waiting on traditional packaging cycles — a direct upgrade to its end-user computing line that customers of its desktop virtualization products get as the integration lands.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in desktop virtualization and application delivery now face a competitor bundling just-in-time app delivery into its existing virtualization estate, echoing the Nicira-vCider sequence where Cisco answered a VMware platform buy with one of its own.
Third-order effects
- If the tuck-in cadence holds, VMware keeps assembling higher software layers — delivery, management, applications — on top of its hypervisor core through acquisitions rather than internal development, consolidating the virtualization stack around a single vendor's platform.
The trend: VMware is building out its end-user computing and cloud stack through a steady rhythm of small capability acquisitions layered onto its virtualization core.