Sources say the European Union will approve Broadcom's $61 billion acquisition of VMware on Wednesday

CTOnews.com, July 12 (Xinhua)-- Reuters quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying that Broadcom's plan to buy cloud computing company VMware for $61 billion (CTOnews.com Note: current 441.03 billion yuan) will receive conditional antitrust approval from the European Union on Wednesday.

As of July 11, u.s. stocks closed at $882.05, up 0.49%, with a market capitalization of $364.009 billion, while VMware rose 5.29% to $151.53 a share, or $65.212 billion.

After months of negotiations with the EU, Broadcom has signed up to behavioural remedies, including a commitment to introduce interoperability standards into its technology to help rival Marvell compete more fairly, the source said.

In April, the European Commission stressed that it would not approve the acquisition unless there were adequate remedies. They believe that the deal could lead to "higher prices, lower quality and less innovation" for corporate customers.

Broadcom successfully addressed the European Commission's concerns about its fibre Channel host bus adapter (FC HBA) last month by providing interoperability remedies to rival Marvell Technology, Reuters said.

At present, Broadcom is already the leading supplier in the field of FC HBA, and FC HBA uses the fibre Channel protocol to connect the server to the storage adapter located outside the server on the storage area network.

The VMware deal is the largest ever acquisition by Broadcom, as it hopes to diversify into enterprise software. It is worth mentioning that the US Federal Trade Commission and the UK competition agency are also reviewing the deal.