VMware Acquires AIOps Vendor Nyansa to Boost SD-WAN

VMware today announced its intent to acquire AIOps provider Nyansa for an undisclosed sum, marking a sustained appetite for acquisitions following its $2.7 billion Pivotal purchase among others. Nyansa currently analyzes user network traffic from more than 20 million client devices across thousands of customer sites at companies including Tesla, Uber, Lululemon, Rooms To Go, GE Healthcare, SF International Airport, Stanford, Northeast Georgia Healthcare System and many others.

As SD-WAN is becoming the de facto connectivity and security platform for distributed enterprises, the overall scope of SD-WAN solutions continues to expand. Customers are now looking for a single platform to provide visibility into network and application performance not only across the WAN, but into the wired/wireless local area network, and back out to the cloud and on premises data centers.

Nyansa’s AI/ML capabilities to VMware’s existing network and security portfolio will make it easier for customers to operate and troubleshoot the Virtual Cloud Network and further VMware’s ability to enable Self-Healing Networks. It will enable VMware to deliver an end-to-end network visibility, monitoring and remediation solution within VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud that can proactively predict client problems, optimize application and network performance and better assure the behavior of critical IoT devices. It will make it easier for customers to operate and troubleshoot network disruptions, or application performance challenges.Nyansa claims to analyze network traffic from more than 20 million client devices across thousands of customer sites at companies including Tesla, Uber, GE Healthcare, San Francisco International Airport, and Stanford University.

The acquisition of Nyansa will also extend end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for both the LAN and WAN, according to Sanjay Uppal, co-founder of VeloCloud and head of VMware’s SD-WAN division. Nyansa is a proven solution that solves many of the shortcomings of today’s vendor-specific solutions,” he said in a statement. At the core of the acquisition is Nyansa’s vendor-agnostic, AIOps platform, which can consolidate network telemetry from a variety of hardware vendors into a single dashboard, eliminating the need for proprietary monitoring tools like Cisco Prime, Aruba Airwave, or SolarWinds.

“Joining forces with VMware provides an amazing platform for Nyansa to continue executing on the vision of a new networking paradigm: an analytic-powered and software-defined virtual cloud network that connects clients to containers in dynamic and distributed enterprises,” said Abe Ankumah, chief executive officer, Nyansa. “Nyansa and VMware are perfectly aligned in technology, products and culture. Following the close of the acquisition, we will continue to advance our AI-driven multi-vendor network analytics platform and double-down on end-to-end user experience and IoT operational assurance.”

The transaction is expected to close in VMware’s fiscal Q1 FY2021, subject to customary closing conditions. This acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on fiscal 2021 operating results.