VMware’s Nyansa Acquisition: 5 Things You Need To Know

From Nyansa’s channel strategy to VMware’s integration plans, here are the five most important things to know about VMware’s acquisition of Nyansa.

What You Need To Know About VMware’s Acquisition Of Nyansa

VMware’s acquisition pace isn’t slowing down in 2020 as the virtualization superstar unveiled on Tuesday its plan to acquire network analytics specialist Nyansa.

VMware has a bullish technology roadmap and sales growth expectations this year with investors betting heavily on the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company in 2020. Nyansa, which is also based in Palo Alto, Calif., owns a full-stack network analytics solution that analyzes, resolves and optimizes the user experience for all devices from access to application.

VMware expects to close the Nyansa acquisition during the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2021, which begins in February. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Here are the five things you need to know about Nyansa’s technology, VMware’s integration plans and what channel partners can expect from the acquisition.

Nyansa Marks VMware’s Tenth Acquisition Since 2019

Before getting into the details of the Nyansa acquisition, it is key to know that VMware just completed its blockbuster $2.7 billion acquisition of Pivotal Software less than one month ago on Dec. 30, 2019. The Pivotal acquisition was one of VMware’s largest acquisitions in years.

In 2019, VMware went on an acquisition tear spending billions acquiring a total of nine companies making it one of the company’s busiest years in history in terms of M&A. Acquisitions included Aetherpal to boost VMware’s Workspace ONE; application and AI-focused BitFusion and Uhana; application security startup Intrinsic; and application deployment specialist Bitnami. One pair of important acquisitions on the networking front include Veriflow, which applies continuous verification to networks to prevent outages and vulnerabilities, and multi-cloud application delivery startup Avi Networks.

Finally, in maybe VMware’s boldest bet, the company decided to take a deep dive into security by buying endpoint security leader Carbon Black for $2.6 billion.

Nyansa marks VMware’s tenth acquisition in about 12 months, which could mean technology and operation integration might take some time.

Nyansa’s Secret Sauce

Founded in 2013, Nyansa was a pioneer in developing a full stack, vendor agnostic, cloud-based user performance management platform called Voyance. With Voyance, which hit the market in 2016, customers are able to automate the end-to-end analysis and critical infrastructure data to improve performance, productivity and security of critical devises.

Voyance is an AIOps platform – artificial intelligence for IT Operations -- that combines powerful network analytics and IoT security in a single platform. The AI-powered analytics engine analyzes every client and device transaction across the entire network, correlating data from disparate sources to pinpoint problems, detect behavior anomalies, surface root causes, and recommend next steps.

The company says it’s the world’s largest and only public Software-as-a-Service analytics service in the market, currently analyzing user network traffic from more than 20 million client devices with customers including Tesla, Uber, GE Healthcare, SF International Airport, Stanford and Northeast Georgia Healthcare System, to name a few. Nyansa investors include Formation 8 and Intel Capital.

“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,” said Nyansa CEO Abe Ankumah.

VMware’s SD-WAN, NSX and Container Plans For Nyansa

Nyansa employees and technology will become strategic to VMware’s SD-WAN by VeloCloud business and NSX-focused network and security vision. Nyansa will help enable VMware to provide end-to-end network visibility, monitoring and remediation solution that can proactively predict issues, optimize application and network performance, and make sure IoT devices are working correctly.

“The acquisition of Nyansa will accelerate VMware’s delivery of end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for LAN/WAN deployments within our industry-leading SD-WAN solution,” said Sanjay Uppal, vice president and general manager for VMware’s VeloCloud Business Unit.

Nyansa’s CEO Ankumah said, as part of VMware, his company will continue creating a new networking paradigm: “An analytic-powered and software-defined virtual cloud network that connects clients to containers in dynamic and distributed enterprise.”

The two companies began partnering in 2019. In a blog post this week, Nyansa’s three founders said it quickly became clear that the Nyansa Voyance end-user centric analytics platform complemented VMware’s overarching network vision.

“Nyansa Voyance will extend the VMware portfolio further into the enterprise campus and branch by adding software-defined capabilities on Wi-Fi and LAN devices to deliver end-to-end visibility and control, while also adding new data and analytics capabilities to the VMware data center portfolio,” said Nyansa’s three founders, CEO Abe Ankumah, CTO Anand Srinivas, and Daniel Kan, vice president of engineering.

Nyansa’s Leaders Have Stellar Resumes

Nyansa’s team is comprised of some of the world’s leading software and networking engineers and Ph.Ds from organizations including MIT, Harvard, Meraki, Aruba Networks and Google.

Prior to co-founding and becoming CEO of Nyansa, Abe Ankumah (pictured) was director of client products and alliances for cloud-managed network star Meraki. In 2012, Meraki was acquired by Cisco for a price tag of $1.2 billion. Cisco Meraki became the company’s flagship cloud-based networking offering for the worldwide network market share leader. Before Meraki, Ankumah was senior director of products and business operations for another networking superstar, Aruba Networks. Aruba was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2015 for $2.7 billion and quickly became HPE’s lead networking software offering. Ankumah career also includes being a research fellow for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Daniel Kan, vice president of engineering, also has a stellar IT resume prior to co-founding Nyansa in 2013. Kan was senior software manager for network and security for Silver Spring Networks, who specialized in IoT smart cities and mesh network architectures. Additionally, Kan was the chief architect for Actiance, providing the vision and direction for the company’s flagship network security product, United Security Gateway.

Nyansa’s CTO Anand Srinivas was the lead algorithms architect for the fast-growing networking specialist Plexxi, who focused on software-defined networking and data fabric innovation. Plexxi was acquired by HPE in 2018 for an undisclosed amount and has since become a centerpiece to HPE’s Composable Fabric architecture. Prior to Plexxi, Srinivas was a principal engineer for wireless and small cell provider Airvana, which was acquired by CommScope.

What Channel Partners Need To Know

VMware channel partners should know that Nyansa is a partner-friendly vendor. When Nyansa launched its flagship Voyance product in 2016, it quickly formed channel partnerships with the likes of CompuNet, Data Network Solutions and Vandis.

Fast forward to 2018, Nyansa’s Voyers Channel Partner Program began attracting channel powerhouses like World Wide Technology, Presidio and Sirius Computer Solutions. “Channel partners effectively define what’s needed in the enterprise network market and are critical to the success of any new product, technology or market segment,” said Ankumah at the time. Highlights of Nyansa’s partner program include technical and sales training, deal registration, joint marketing and sales calls, and a partner portal.

Now backed by thousands of new VMware channel partners, Nyansa says it expects to scale significantly.

“With this partnership, the data sets driving the Nyansa Voyance analytics engine will increase by orders of magnitude, yielding tremendous new insights and benefits to all customers,” said Nyansa’s three founders in a blog post. “In all our interactions thus far, the VMware team has embodied similar values that will allow the Nyansa team to continue to thrive, while also leveraging the resources and scale of VMware. … For our customers this means we’re now backed by an amazing partner who is fully committed to continuing to advance the Voyance network analytics platform. It’s no surprise that most of our customers are already VMware customers in some capacity, given VMware’s immense reach into enterprises.”