Feature
VMware announced today its intention to acquire Wavefront, a cloud-based metrics monitoring and analytics platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Officials at VMware, which provides virtualization and cloud infrastructure software, said the acquisition will help the Palo Alto, Calif.-based $7.09 billion company "set the standard for cross-cloud and modern application monitoring."
"VMware set the standard for monitoring virtual environments with VMware vRealize Operations," Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager of the cloud management business unit for VMware, said in a statement.
Wavefront delivers a new scope and scale of metrics monitoring and analytics that, combined with VMWare's vRealize product portfolio, will help organizations get a "complete view from network through infrastructure to applications," Singh added.
Microservices-Based Architecture
Wavefront's technology ecosystem is composed of microservices and containers.
CMSWire reporter Scott Fulton defined containerization as
"a concept of workload virtualization that transcends virtual machines as we have come to know them. Virtual machines (VMs) enabled existing workloads to transcend the boundaries of single servers, and later moved them outside the firewalls of their data centers. Containerization (such as Docker) shifts the focus of data center management from virtual machines (servers that don’t know they’re not real) to applications, running within virtualized components that know where they are and what they’re doing."
Wavefront's tech stack will help developers test and run their apps in cross-cloud environments and DevOps teams access real-time analytics on their high-scale distributed systems, VMware officials said.
Wavefront provides streaming metric data updates from clouds and modern applications across multiple infrastructure environments such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), VMware officials said.
Wavefront's app-monitoring technology will integrate with VMware's vRealize Operations platform for monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity planning across virtual environments.
The news comes a day after Microsoft also made a play to extend its cloud services with purchase of open source container technology specialist Deis.
Funding Momentum
Wavefront, also based in Palo Alto, is coming off a $52 million Series B funding round in October. Founded in 2013, Wavefront officials told CMSWire last fall that it helps organizations detect divergences from “normal” in hybrid and cloud infrastructures.
Its valuation increased four times since it closed on $13.5 million in Series A funding in 2014, while the company was still in stealth. That round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Sequoia Capital, which joined new investor Tenaya Capital and other equity holders in last October's Series B round.
It includes a number of big name customers including Workday, Box, Intuit, Lyft, Groupon, Okta, British Gas, Citrix, Doordash, Xactly, Edmunds.com and Medallia.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
6
The Future of Social Media: Emerging Trends and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve
The impact of emerging technologies like AI on social media
Webinar
Jun
7
The Building Blocks of Personalization
This webinar will explore how personalization can create powerful ecommerce shopping experience.
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
Webinar
On demand
AI for Marketers: Optimize Personalization Across the Funnel
Understand the benefits of utilizing AI across your entire marketing stack
Wavefront was founded by three current employees — Dev Nag, now CTO; engineer Durren Shen and Chief Architect Clement Pang — and Sam Pullara, who was a senior infrastructure engineer at Twitter before becoming managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures.
Google Roots
Nag and Pang worked together as engineers at Google, where Nag helped develop the back-end for all financial processing of Google ad revenue and Pang led the infrastructure group that handled the processing of signals and machine learning models responsible for protecting major Google properties (AdWords, AdSense, Checkout and Gmail) against fraud and abuse.
They helped developed a system to monitor Google's own health called Borg-Mon (named after the Star Trek character).
Wavefront partners with Amazon Web Services in cloud infrastructure. Wavefront also works with commercial and open source components and tools including monitoring services New Relic and Sensu, notification services PagerDuty and VictorOps, messaging services Slack and Atlassian, and single sign-on services Microsoft and Okta.
VMware's Changing Times
VMware is in a transitional period after a major acquisition last fall. It's part of Dell Technologies, which acquired prior VMware owner EMC in September. Dell acquired EMC assets Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware in the $67 billion mega deal.
The deal does come with several cautions for VMware, as company officials admitted in their 2016 annual report filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
They cautioned "overlap" between Dell's and VMware's technology, including the areas of software-based storage, management, hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud computing. They also noted VMware's partners compete with Dell.
VMware has more than 500,000 customers, 75,000 partners and 19,900 employees. It reported revenue of $7.09 billion for 2016, up from $6.57 billion the prior year.
