Transforming Network Infrastructure Gets Boost with Acquisition
The movement in the telecommunications industry doesn’t always focus on innovation. Sometimes the focus is on leveraging resources through other entities to expand reach and grab more market share. When transforming network infrastructure relies on more than just the resources at hand, it’s a good thing to see one offering become better through the benefits of acquisition.
To that end, Juniper Networks is set to acquire AppFormix, a cloud monitoring firm, according to this Data Center Knowledge piece. The deal was announced last week and surprised many in the industry as AppFormix has been positioning itself as an innovator in the data centers operations and monitoring space. A major Intel partner, the company has been techniques and tools for monitoring Intel Xeon CPUs at a very low level. The deal with Juniper Networks is expected to be completed before the end of December.
Ankur Singla, CEO of Juniper’s Contrail Systems subsidiary, said in a company blog post Thursday that “AppFormix is unique in that it combines the power of machine learning and streaming analytics with application awareness of orchestration systems like OpenStack and Kubernetes. This gives cloud operators, as well as application developers, a dashboard and APIs to understand both the workloads and the infrastructure stack, improving both applications and operations management.”
To deliver better solutions for those focused on transforming network infrastructure, AppFormix has been actively working with Intel to better comprehend the dynamics of distributed workloads at the processor level. Research Director Technology (RDT) from Intel is a component of the latest Xeon CPUs that share low-level performance data with third party applications through API functions in the code. AppFormix’ service analysis tool, ContainerFlow relies on RDT to visualize problems introduced by application containers.
This appeals to Juniper as AppFormix’ efforts have recently been integrated with innovations from OpenContrail, the open source project based on Junipers Contrail service orchestration model for NFV and SD-WAN. There was already work being done to pair OpenContrail with AppFormix’s machine learning and predictive analytics algorithms. If the two companies work as well together as they have in the development stages of these innovations, those focused on transforming network infrastructure will have access to much more powerful solutions.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
