Virtual Instruments Acquires Xangati To Expand Its Infrastructure Performance Management Market

Virtual Instruments wants to expand its infrastructure performance management capabilities with its acquisition of Xangati, a developer of hybrid cloud and virtualization performance management.

San Jose, Calif.-based Virtual Instruments' acquisition of Xangati stems from a massive shift in how customers have built their enterprise IT infrastructures, said John Gentry, chief technology officer of Virtual Instruments.

Virtual Instruments has done well with infrastructure performance management in VMware and other enterprise environments, thanks to its VirtualWisdom infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics application, Gentry told CRN. Adding to that core competency, the company, in March, merged with Load DynamiX, a provider of storage performance analytics, he said.

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"Virtual Instruments could monitor traditional enterprise infrastructures like VMware Vblocks or VMware server farms with NetApp," he said. "But we weren't supporting emerging trends like converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure, software-define, or hybrid clouds. These are the areas that Xangati was focused on, with its advanced networking capabilities."

Unlike Virtual Instruments or Load DynamiX, which were born in the storage performance monitoring market and migrated to the compute side of the business, Xangati was born on the networking side and is moving to manage the compute and storage parts, Gentry said.

"So we are getting more expansive capabilities around the cloud, networking, and containers," he said. "Xangati brings us the analytics capabilities needed to analyze large sets of data to make informed decisions."

With the new capabilities being brought on with Xangati comes the ability for customers to use Virtual Instruments to take better advantage of service-level agreements, Gentry said.

"Xangati brings visibility to the network infrastructure, with deep analytics around VMware VSAN and virtual desktop infrastructures," he said. "This provides increased support for customers, with new types of analytics including contention analytics and streaming analytics. This completes the picture for complete end-to-end monitoring and management of application workflows in modern enterprises."

The combined company will still be focused on the monitoring side of performance management, but automated management in response to issues is now closer, Gentry said.

"With the acquisition, we're keeping human intervention in the middle," he said. "But as the automation and the required algorithms get strong and build trust in the customer base, it's possible to someday provide pro-active actions for management."

The Xangati acquisition is an important addition to Virtual Instruments' portfolio, said John Boyle, senior client executive at Mainline Information Systems, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based solution provider and Virtual Instruments channel partner.

Xangati makes it easier for customers to work with a wider range of enterprise IT infrastructures than possible with Virtual Instruments alone, Boyle told CRN.

"Virtual Instruments had its primary focus on Fibre Channel," he said. "It offered several modules that worked with complimentary technologies. But for real-time analytics, Virtual Instruments worked best in the Fibre Channel space. No one else had the audacity to open up Fibre Channel to do analytics. But with Xangati, no one else with has nearly as comprehensive an offering."

It is critical for Mainline Information Systems to get to the newer use cases as soon as possible, given its long history in the IBM mainframe market, Boyle said.

"Now we're seeing applications more and more being built outside the data center," he said. "If IT can't keep up with the changes, they'll be left behind."

Virtual Instruments is retaining 100 percent of Xangati's engineering team, and Xangati Founder Jagan Jagannathan is joining Virtual Instruments as its chief innovation officer, Gentry said.

The company is planning for a major Xangati release late this year, with integration between the two companies' technologies slated to start in 2017, with the first integrated solutions slated to go into general availability in Spring of 2017, he said.

Between 85 and 95 percent of Virtual Instruments' revenue comes via indirect sales channels, Gentry said. Before the acquisition, Virtual Instruments had about 70 global channel partners, while Xangati worked with over 100 channel partners, although the majority of Xangati's business came from a small handful of those partners, he said.