VMware has announced its purchase of Avi Networks, a multi-cloud software-defined application delivery solutions company.
VMware, the datacenter company?
VMware has been moving away from the traditional datacenter in recent years. Its roots are in virtualization solutions that power on-prem infrastructure with ESXi, vSphere, VSAN and NSX.
The Avi Networks acquisition is not the first proof point that VMware is trying to buy its way into public cloud. Many of its previous acquisitions have been in the multi-cloud space, notably Nicira, VeloCloud, Heptio and Bitnami.
Moving to cloud-like experiences
VMware believes in delivering the public cloud experience, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. That strategy leads them to create and acquire solutions that enable self-service on-demand consumption of infrastructure and platform services for virtual machines, containers, networking and storage across on-premises, hybrid cloud and native public cloud.
The Avi Networks acquisition gives VMware cloud-native application delivery capabilities with centrally managed, cloud-aware load balancers. Avi Networks is not dissimilar to NSX, and the Avi team will join forces with the NSX team. Avi Networks already had technical integration between their products and VMware’s NSX, and further integration of the two technologies seems to be the logical next step.
The Avi (ad)Vantage
Avi Networks provides not only the application delivery infrastructure, but gives application and infrastructure owners the insights and real-time analytics into application flows to scale and secure applications from a single solution. As a software-only and API-first product, Avi’s load balancers are easily integrated into CI/CD pipelines for maximum developer productivity. Enterprises need a consistent, unified approach of delivering applications across different on-prem and cloud environments. Avi Networks automates application delivery and security in a self-service manner. Avi’s universal service mesh and the Istio acquisition earlier this year position VMware as a microservices service mesh platform.
Avi Networks was founded in 2012 and has raised $115 million in four rounds since that time. VMware and Avi did not disclosed the purchase price.
