Microsoft acquires AVIcode to become its secret weapon in cloud application performance monitoring.
BALTIMORE-Microsoft
has acquired
AVIcode, a software firm
specializing in .NET APM (application
performance monitoring).
The
deal is a boon to both companies, as Microsoft gains solid technology to help
take customers more confidently to the cloud, and AVIcode gets what it has been
seeking from day one-an opportunity to see its technology gain traction in a
high-visibility, high-volume situation. The financial details of the
transaction were not disclosed.
AVIcode's
management couldn't be happier, particularly my Chesapeake Bay
crab-cracking pal,
Mike
Curreri, president and CEO of the Baltimore-based company. In an Oct. 6
blog post, he said: "It is with great pleasure that I announce AVIcode Inc. has
today been acquired by Microsoft. Both AVIcode and Microsoft share a common
vision about the evolution of application performance management and monitoring
and the ever- growing need for organizations to gain 360-degree visibility into
both application behavior and user experience."
Meanwhile,
Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of the Management and Security Division
at Microsoft, in his own Oct. 6 post, said, AVIcode will become a wholly owned
subsidiary of Microsoft, with the software being delivered through the System
Center product family.
I'm
not one to say I told you so, but I once called AVIcode
Microsoft's
"secret weapon" for its DSI (Dynamic Systems Initiative). That was five
years ago. This acquisition signals Microsoft's acknowledgement of that claim.
Anderson
also acknowledges that Microsoft has been using the AVIcode technology in its own
data center operations.
Anderson
said in his post that as Microsoft has been moving more of its solutions in the
past year to be delivered as SAAS (software as a service) and bring Windows
Azure (PAAS, or platform as a service) online, it has seen the need to extend
its monitoring capabilities in the following ways:
- to
enable an understanding of how end-users experience an application's
performance and quality;
- to
trace the performance of critical business transactions; and
- to
gain insight into the relationship of the hardware and software components of a
distributed application or service.
AVIcode
has developed solutions that deliver these enhanced scenarios-all integrated
with System Center Operations Manager. We have been using the AVIcode solution
in conjunction with Operations Manager in our data centers on services such as
Xbox Live for a number of years."
Moreover,
Anderson added, "As more and more applications move to run from the cloud,
organizations will want to have access to the capabilities that AVIcode delivers-enabling
organizations to gain a much deeper understanding of the actual end-user experience,
with the details to 1) understand when performance and availability is not at
the desired service level; and 2) quickly diagnose where the root issues are
that lead to latency within the service, resulting in a poor performance
experience for the end-users."
Curreri
said: "With AVIcode's technology, thousands of users worldwide have
dramatically reduced the time required to diagnose and resolve application
problems. AVIcode's real-time detection, alerting and root-cause diagnosis
capabilities-from both the server and end-user perspective-are unmatched, and
when paired with a systems management solution like Microsoft System Center
Operations Manager, deliver unsurpassed visibility into the entire application
environment, from the end-user, across application tiers and back."
Curreri
and Anderson agree that the combination of Microsoft's System Center Operations
Manager and AVIcode's technology enables organizations to get a 360-degree view
of their service. And this view is "independent of where the service is hosted,
whether a data center/cloud, in a partner's hosted data center/cloud, or from a
public cloud solution such as Windows Azure," Anderson
said. "This integrated solution gives a comprehensive inside-out and outside-in
view of the service-of all the services your end-users are using independent of
where the service is running."
Anderson
said Microsoft will begin integrating the AVIcode technologies into the System
Center fold over time, and
Microsoft will soon deliver a roadmap. More information on the deal can be
found on the Microsoft Pathways site.
"A
key concept at issue here is that as the world moves more and more to the
cloud, application performance monitoring becomes more critical," Curreri told
eWEEK in an interview. "The cloud can't work without strong APM."
While
the financial details were not disclosed, Curreri said the deal was a
"technology and talent acquisition." AVIcode maintains two operations: its Baltimore
headquarters and a development center in St. Petersburg,
Russia. The development
team in Russia
will likely move to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond,
Wash. However, final details of how
personnel issues will shake out have yet to be determined.
"We've
always been very attached at the hip to Microsoft," Curreri told eWEEK.
Although
AVIcode is a relatively small company, this acquisition has to be strategic for
Microsoft, as it is only the fifth acquisition the software giant has made in
the last 22 months, the company said. And this is the first acquisition
Microsoft has announced in 2010, though the company has quietly made others.
Hats
off to Mike Curreri and his crew. The next crab-cracking outing is on me. But,
wait, you just sold the company to Microsoft.
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