Satya Nadella (Microsoft)
EU anti-trust regulators will decide by 19 October whether to clear Microsoft's US$7.5 billion acquisition of privately held coding website GitHub.
Microsoft, which wants to acquire the firm to reinforce its cloud computing business against rival Amazon, requested European Union approval for the deal last Friday, a filing on the European Commission website showed on Monday.
The EU competition enforcer can either give the green light with or without demanding concessions, or it can open a full-scale investigation if it has serious concerns.
GitHub, the world's largest code host with more than 28 million developers using its platform, is Microsoft's largest takeover since the company bought LinkedIn for US$26 billion in 2016.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tried to assuage users' worries that GitHub might favour Microsoft products over competitors after the deal, saying GitHub would continue to be an open platform that works with all public clouds.
According to Nadella, GitHub will retain its “developer-first ethos” and will “operate independently” to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries.
Furthermore, Nadella said developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of “their choice for their projects”, while maintaining the ability to deploy code to “any operating system, any cloud and any device”.
As reported by ARN, Microsoft unveiled plans to acquire the software development platform in June 2018, designed to create a competitive edge in an expanding cloud market.
The transaction sees the tech giant take control of a platform housing more than 28 million developers, taking direct aim at long-time cloud rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the process.
Representing a monumental bet on Microsoft Azure, the deal will see both parties drive development lifecycle improvements, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub and bring the vendor’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
In short, the cloud provider acquires a platform universally known by developers, with GitHub branding itself as the “world’s largest code host”.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Edmund Blair)
