VMware To Acquire Blue Medora’s True Visibility Business

Partners see potential to benefit VMware customers through deeper integrations that deliver intelligent automation of operations and greater visibility into the application layer.

VMware went into the holiday weekend with a deal to boost its hybrid cloud management capabilities by buying a technology partner’s product line.

The virtualization giant said Friday it agreed to acquire Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite business unit, which develops tools popular in the VMware ecosystem for automating management of applications as well as hybrid infrastructure.

VMware is an investor in the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based company that adds functionality to VMware’s vRealize platform through a series of management packs.

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The acquisition, at an undisclosed price, will enable even deeper integration between vRealize Operations and True Visibility Suite, Alex Wang, VMware’s vice president for corporate development, said in a company blog post.

And the Blue Medora product team that VMware knows “inside and out and vice versa” will help “further our self-driving operations capabilities,” Wang said.

“We anticipate that the integration of the teams and increased integration between VMware vRealize Operations and the True Visibility Suite will lead to richer capabilities for customers to further optimize their packaged applications and infrastructure,” Wang said.

While Blue Medora is closely associated with True Visibility, the company founded in 2007 by a former IBM Tivoli executive focuses on a broader set of capabilities it categorizes as IT monitoring integration-as-a-Service.

Blue Medora’s other major product, BindPlane, offers an IT data management platform that integrates with New Relic and streams metrics and logs from Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Wang noted many VMware customers already use True Visibility, and VMware has resold those products for years.

“VMware vRealize Operations has extended its reach to a growing number of applications, middleware software, clouds and hardware servers, storage devices, and more, with the help of the partnership with Blue Medora,” he said.

Bringing True Visibility under VMware’s roof will benefit customers by allowing them to go directly to VMware for their product, support and sales needs.

The deal charts a good direction for VMware, said David Klee, founder and chief architect at Heraflux Technologies, a Lincoln, Nebraska-based VMware partner, as VMware needs to increase its awareness of what’s happening on its platform at the application layer.

“Without application-aware telemetry, you don’t get the complete picture for IT operations,” Klee said. The Blue Medora suite “will help to make their platform more intelligently aware to help provide better performance and availability for the applications running on VMware.”

VMware has been extremely focused of late on leveraging technologies that automate and optimize operations management for its customers, said Duan van der Westhuizen, senior vice president of product at Faction, a multi-cloud data services provider that partners with VMware.

The Blue Medora deal is strategically consistent with previous acquisitions, he said, steadily advancing VMware’s ability to leverage artificial intelligence to power operations management.

“Over time, as True Visibility is integrated, we expect this acquisition to be valuable to the VMware ecosystem,” van der Westhuizen told CRN.

VMware vRealize Operations is part of the larger vRealize multi-cloud management suite that was born out of the 2012 acquisition of DynamicOps.

That particular component caused problems for VMware earlier this year—the company was dinged $236 million in January after a federal jury found vRealize Operations infringed on patents owned by cloud optimization vendor Densify.

Like Blue Medora, Densify partnered with VMware around technology integrations, but the relationship grew more competitive in recent years.

Densify, based in Toronto, claimed new versions of vRealize Operations—7.0 and 7.5—violated intellectual property rights involving capabilities that optimize how applications use computing resources in the cloud and on-premise data centers.

Blue Medora started out developing systems management technology that it sold to IBM and Oracle for use in their products. The company first attracted attention in 2013, when it extended Oracle's systems management tools to work in VMware environments.