The European Commission has endorsed this Wednesday the acquisition of VMware, a company dedicated to cloud infrastructure and business mobility, by the semiconductor company Broadcom, although the operation, valued at 61,000 million dollars, is subject to a series of conditions . Specifically, Broadcom has agreed to provide access to its programs and interfaces, as well as to ensure interoperability with those developed by Marvell and “any other potential” competitor in the global fiber host adapter market.
Specifically, Brussels has concluded after an investigation launched in December last year that the transactions as conceived had had negative effects on competition in the world market for supplies of fiber ‘host’ adapters (FC HBA). For the community authorities, the risk was that the acquisition without conditions would give Broadcom the “capacity” and the “incentive” to “override” Marvell, its only rival in this market, restricting or worsening the interoperability between the programs of VMware and its competitor.
In addition, the US company has promised the community authorities changes in its internal organization to separate its teams that work with fiber “host” adapters from those that will be responsible for certification and technical support to third parties.
Brussels thought “carefully” about the effectiveness of these commitments, for which it consulted both Marvell and the companies that are “direct consumers” of these adapters, and concluded after obtaining “positive responses” from all of them that the operation “is no longer competition problems” in the FC HBA market. In any case, the Community Executive stressed that the green light for transactions is subject to “full compliance” with said commitments and their obligatory maintenance for a period of ten years.
