APM, Enterprise, Mergers and Acquisitions

VMware Acquires Wavefront for Multi-Cloud Management; Counters Cisco AppDynamics, New Relic APM

VMware is acquiring Wavefront, which develops a metrics monitoring service for cloud and application environments. Wavefront potentially competes in some ways with Cisco AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and other application performance monitoring (APM) tools. Financial terms were not disclosed.

According to VMware:

"Wavefront provides metrics monitoring to optimize clouds and modern applications by delivering operational insights using millions of data points per second in real-time. Operators and developers can interrogate real-time data streams to discover new ways to address problems, identify bottlenecks, and test algorithms and hypotheses. A cloud-hosted service, Wavefront ingests, stores, visualizes, and alerts on streaming metric data from clouds and modern applications enabling superior operational performance. Scaling to support the largest data center needs, the service can measure, correlate, and analyze across servers, devices, applications, end-user behavior, multiple public cloud and data center attributes, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments, and business metrics."

That's a lengthy (um, almost painful...) way of saying DevOps teams now need multi-cloud management and modern application performance monitoring (APM) tools. VMware believes Wavefront is another piece in the puzzle to fill that void.

VMware Partner Program, Strategic Direction

Channel partners -- particularly MSPs -- also could benefit from the VMware-WaveFront deal. Indeed, MSPs increasingly monitor cloud applications, customer experience (CX) and DevOps services for clientele.

WaveFront appears to align well with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger's Cross-Cloud Services strategy. VMware recently sold its vCloud Air business to OVHs, and also is preparing VMware Cloud for Amazon Web Services. As the company's traditional server virtualization business matures, VMware has also accelerated its vSAN (storage virtualization) and NSX (network virtualization) businesses.

Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.