Broadcom is set to gain conditional approval from the European Commission for its $61 billion acquisition of VMware, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal is still subject to approval from the British competition agency, which is expected to announce its provisional findings next month.
The EU’s approval is conditional on Broadcom providing interoperability remedies to address competition concerns. One of the remedies focuses on Fibre Channel Host-Bus Adapters (FC HBAs), which are storage adapters that connect servers to storage located outside the server on a storage-area network using the fiber channel protocol.
The deal, which would be Broadcom’s largest acquisition to date, would give the chipmaker a major foothold in the cloud computing market. It is touted to allow Broadcom to offer a more complete suite of products and services to its customers.
The deal has also been met with some resistance from VMware shareholders, who have criticized the offer price as being too low. However, Broadcom has said that it is confident that the deal will be approved by shareholders.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.