VMware has been digging deep into their pocket change this week with not one but two acquisition announcements. Firstly VMware announced their intention to acquire Datrium, a data storage and resilience company. The second was to bring more of Blue Medora in-house with the acquisition of their True Visibility suite of products. At Amazic World, we’ve covered VMware’s acquisitions before, but as VMware acquires Datrium and Blue Medora, the company seems on a spree to fill gaps in its own portfolio.
Why Datrium?
Datrium as a company incorporated in 2012 as an HCI company with a peculiar slant. They called this disaggregated HCI. So not really HCI but more akin to a caching technology coupled to a traditional SAN architecture. However, they recently pivoted to cloud-based disaster recovery, after realizing that their architecture provided a solution to quickly backup, de-dupe, and store incremental backups to cloud storage. Coupled with a method of providing immediate failover to a different site (sound familiar – this is what VMware SRM promised). The company has excellent technology but unfortunately, their marketing team is not of the same caliber.
So if VMware already has SRM that appears to fill this product market space in-house, why would VMware need it? Datrium had tied their flag firmly to VMware’s flagpole: they took their fledgling DR solution and optimized it to recover local VMware deployments into the public cloud and they have heavy integration with VMware Cloud in AWS, and no doubt advanced R&D into VMware on GCP, and VMware on Oracle and others, too.
From the perspective of VMware, this is a powerful acquisition to their portfolio. SRM development has effectively stalled: the last major improvement to that product was the ability to recover to disparate Storage platforms. Yes, VMware has a DRaaS play but that is not gaining any ground from Veeam and Zerto, the leaders in this market. Their other Cloud-based recovery platforms like Cloud Availability are great on replication but fall short on failing over and failing back as they do not have any real automation workflows built-in. From a go-to-market perspective with the levels of VMware integrations Datrium already as with their product, there is very little to do other than the re-branding exercise.
After the deal closes, Datrium’s engineering team and their IP in cloud storage and end-to-end DR services will be merged into the VMware Cloud division, which will expand to include a fully-featured DRaaS where customers will be able to experience a consistent operating model across both hybrid and public cloud during DR instantiation.
Why Blue Medora’s TVS?
Blue Medora is a company that is deeply integrated into the VMware Management ecosystem: they are the authors of the vast majority of 3rd party vRealize Operations Management plugins. VMware has had an odd relationship with them over the years starting back in 2015 when they effectively heavily invested in the company as part of their Series A funding round. VMware again invested in their series B, but since then have not directly added to their investment. However, now they have decided to pull a full product and team into VMware for an undisclosed amount.
So why go from investor to purchasing part of the business?. And why purchase the crown jewels and leave the vROPS MOBs still in the original company? This is a not too unexpected acquisition as VMware and Blue Medora partner at over 400 companies with vROPs and TVS to provide dynamic discovery of customer applications and infrastructure and provide a more intelligent method of presenting mapping data and analyzing metrics. These results are then driven through automation to reduce operational overhead and increase application availability.
This is a good win for VMware this product will seamlessly dovetail into their current management suite offerings. For Blue Medora, they get a significant cash injection without having to further dilute their stock, allowing them to invest further in R&D.
Summary
I think that it’s a safe bet that VMware’s shopping spree won’t stop anytime soon and that it’s still looking for some key bargain basement buys due to pandemic-induced cash-flow issues. But their business so far this quarter has been inspired. These two acquisitions will be easy to integrate into their respective business units. The technology is already understood by their Sales and Sales Engineers and both purchases do not require any marketing gymnastics to add to their messaging.
