VMware continues to be on a buying tear. On Tuesday, the Dell-owned cloud and virtualization giant announced its intent to purchase artificial intelligence-based network analytics startup Nyansa for an undisclosed amount. This comes just three weeks after VMware completed its $2.7 billion acquisition of Pivotal.
The deal is VMware's second AI related purchase in less than six months. In August, it completed its purchase of Bitfusion, an Austin-based startup specializing in virtualization software for the accelerated computing required for most machine learning workloads.
Nysansa is the six-year-old Palo Alto-based startup behind Voyance, a cloud-based network analytics system that measures end user experiences by analyzing and measuring client network transactions without using client software and server agents or additional hardware sensors. Its customer base includes Uber, Walmart, Tesla, Procter and Gamble, and others.
VMware said it intends on pairing Voyance technology with the VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud, its software-defined wide area networking platform, to bring an end-to-end network visibility, monitoring, and remediation solution that can "proactively predict client problems, optimize application and network performance, and better assure the behavior of IoT devices."
Sanjay Uppal, VP and GM of VMware's VeloCloud business unit, offered a list of benefits he thinks customers will see from this acquisition.
"First, Nyansa can proactively predict client problems, optimize their network, better enable the behavior of critical IoT devices, and justify infrastructure changes based on actual user, network, and application data," he said in a blog post. "Second, you will be able to use the breadth and depth of Nyansa’s data ingestion and analysis, including packet analysis and metrics via API across multi-vendor wired and wireless LAN environments. Finally, the combination of Nyansa’s AI/ML capabilities with VMware’s existing analytics, visibility and remediation capabilities will make it easier for you to operate and troubleshoot the virtual cloud network and accelerate the realization of a self-healing network."
A blog penned by Nyansa's three co-founders (CEO Abe Ankumah, CTO Anand Srinivas, and VP of engineering Daniel Kan) assured Nyansa's customers that the transition should be positive for existing customers.
"It’s no surprise that most of our customers are already VMware customers in some capacity, given VMware’s immense reach into enterprises," they wrote. "With this partnership, the data sets driving the Nyansa Voyance analytics engine will increase by orders of magnitude, yielding tremendous new insights and benefits to all customers."
VMware expecfts to close the transaction in its fiscal Q1 2021.
