Virtana's OpsCruise Deal Expands Cloud Platform

Cloud operations management specialist Virtana last week made an interesting deal to expand its products and services into hybrid cloud management, with the acquisition of cloud observability and automation specialist OpsCruise.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based OpsCruise has made a name for itself among cloud-native engineers looking to manage applications using a wide variety of open-source and cloud compute tools such as Prometheus and Kubernetes. It's been named as a Gartner Cool Vendor and counts Avis Budget Group, Chicago Trading, Quest Diagnostics, Telefonica, and Verizon Wireless as customers.

OpsCruise has about 50 employees. It was founded in 2018 and backed by The Fabric, a Silicon Valley startup foundry focused on cloud and IoT infrastructure. The company will be folded fully into Virtana by the end of the year. Virtana does not disclose its employee count but based on public data, it looks like this will triple the size of the company to about 150 employees.

Building a Hybrid Cloud Platform

One of the keys to OpsCruise is that it is geared toward monitoring, managing, and operating in open-source environments. Virtana has built tools in on-premises app monitoring and management, so the combination with OpsCruise will enable it to address hybrid cloud environments.

Virtana believes this approach will be important as customers increasingly combine on-premises platforms with cloud. The company also sees an opportunity to help save companies on costs by consolidating management tools, especially in areas such as monitoring, where proprietary cloud monitoring tools can get expensive. Virtana's platform also includes cloud cost management (CCM) solutions, which will help consolidate the management of cloud environments and reduce costs.

"Increased visibility is important in the current economy," James Harper, director of product marketing for Virtana, told me. "We will reduce infrastructure costs by 35% by balancing workloads and footprint. We can also help reduce carbon footprint to improve sustainability."

The chart below shows how Virtana has now crossed over into cloud with CCM capabilities and workload placement and container management.

(Source: Virtana)

A Focus on Open Source

OpsCruise helps IT, DevOps, and System Resource Engineering (SRE) teams to identify and predict degradation of compute operations. It does this by using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to monitor behaviors in cloud compute environments including Kubernetes.

One of the keys to the OpsCruise platform is that it is targeted at engineering teams using leading open-source monitoring tools, including Prometheus and JAEGER. It says that it provides "contextually integrated open source and cloud provider telemetry."

The open-source angle can be important on the cost-containment front, as 2023 has proven to be the year of "cloud optimization," in which companies are taking a microscope to the wide range of platforms and tools they are using to manage the cloud. In some cases, an expansion of proprietary management tools, which consume lots of cloud data, can drive up costs. Engineering teams can look at open-source solutions that are more economical in the way they collect data and monitor cloud apps.

Harper says one of the keys to the acquisition of OpsCruise is that it speeds up Virtana's development process. The company was working on hybrid cloud automation and monitoring, but the deal will give them the capabilities faster.

"We will have all of this technology integrated by the end of the year -- possibly by October," said Harper. "We are excited about this, there is very little overlap. Root cause analysis is probably one of the more exciting parts of this acquisition."

Virtana may have found a jewel in the rough. On the technology review site G2, OpsCruise has a five-star rating, with customers lauding its monitoring capabilities and economics.

"Our expenditures are easy to understand & optimize our cloud resources through its pricing forecast insights," wrote one user. "We can integrate it with various open-source monitoring components such as Prometheus & KSM with few clicks."

Futuriom Analyst Take: This looks like a savvy and sensible deal to expand Virtana's platform and take advantage of trends such as CCM and hybrid cloud.