Nutanix makes two acquisitions to boost its cloud offerings

Nutanix filed to go public in December, but the process has since stalled

Nutanix, which filed to go public back in December, has been a victim of the down IPO market this year. However, the Web-scale converged infrastructure company isn't sitting on its laurels either, instead continuing its goal of delivering an Enterprise Cloud Platform that rivals the public cloud.

On Monday the company announced that it has made two acquisitions, picking up PernixData, a provider of scale-out data acceleration and analytics, and Calm.io, a provider of DevOps automation.

Nutalix's acquisition of Calm.io has already closed, while the purchase of PernixData is still subject to customary closing conditions. No financial terms of either deal were disclosed.

Details of the acquisitions are not being disclosed yet, including whether or not the two companies will be shutting down, how Nutanix might be integrating their technology, nor how many employees will be coming to wotk at Nutanix, though a company spokesperson did tell me that "a majority of the employees from the two companies will be joining Nutanix."

"At this time, we’re not commenting on our roadmap and we will share updates with you in the near future," the spokesperson told me. 

Both companies will help Nutanix enhance its Application Mobility Fabric by bringing cross-cloud workload migration and workflow automation to its Prism management software.

"Six months ago we unveiled our vision for the enterprise cloud which goes beyond the features of the hyperconverged industry and addressed the needs of customers five years from now," Sunil Potti, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Product Management at Nutanix, told me. 

"PernixData and Calm.io are two companies with outstanding technology and exceptional teams that will help us continue to execute on that vision, offering a platform that rivals the agility, automation and consumer-grade consumption of the public cloud while not sacrificing the control, security and long-term economics of on-prem infrastructure."

In a blog post, Potti explained why the company made each of these purchases, and how they fit in with where the company is going, calling them" two like-minded, like-spirited and like-willed teams."

PernixData

When it comes to PernixData, the two companies "share the architectural design philosophy that next-generation datacenter fabrics must keep data and applications close in order to drive the fastest possible performance and to deliver flexible, cost-effective infrastructure scaling," he said.

The San Jose-based PernixData solves the problem of what to do with limited storage space. While the traditional method of creating more space was to build more hardware, PernixData's flagship product, PernixData FVP Software, decouples the hardware and the software. It virtualizes server flash and RAM to enable scale-out storage performance that is independent of capacity. That allows apps to run 10 times faster.

"Over the last 4 years, Pernix has built very strong scale-out data acceleration technologies. More importantly, they 'see' every IO without compromising on data consistency. That gives us a unique vantage point to pull off online application migration, with the 1-click delight that Nutanix has always stood for, " said Potti.

While "PernixData’s technology will be integrated into the Nutanix family," Poojan Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of PernixData, wrote in his own blog post, it will also continue to support its existing customers.

"The synergies between the two companies, around the culture, team, commitment to product excellence and attention to detail and lastly ambition, are truly remarkable and we expect this to be a 1+1 = 3 as the two companies come together," he said.

Founded in 2012, PernixData had raised $62 million in venture funding, most recently a $35 million round two years ago. Investors included Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Lightspeed Ventures, Marc Benioff, Jim Davidson, Steve Luczo, Lane Bess, Mark Leslie and John Thompson.

Calm.io

Calm.io, meanwhile, lets users deploy, manage and maintain distributed applications in private and public cloud environments. It allows customers to pick the right cloud for each of their applications, which can help alleviate security concerns. 

Potti says Nutanix spent the last nine months getting to know the company, seeing how the team would allow it to expand the "scope of infrastructure invisibility by democratizing application orchestration while still approaching it via a top-down design."

"With Calm integrated with Prism, customers will finally be able to choose the right cloud for the right workload, achieve seamless application mobility while experiencing the same simple, delightful, and consistent experience they have come to love and respect about Nutanix," he said. 

Going foward, nothing will change for Calm.io's existing customers, Aaditya Sood, the company's founder and CEO, wrote in a blog post. 

"Together we will combine Nutanix’s design-first vision and Calm.io’s application-centric approach to achieve seamless application mobility across hybrid clouds while providing customers with a delightful user experience," he said.

Calm.io had raised $4 million in venture funding from Microsoft Accelerator Bangalore and Sequoia Capital. 

Founded in September 2009, the San Jose-based Nutanix is a virtualized datacenter platform that provides datacenter infrastructure solutions.

In December, the company filed for an IPO, and said it was looking to raise $200 million. However, the process has since stalled, with the company not yet pricing its shares. That has come as the IPO market hit the skids this year, slumping to just six altogether in the first quarter of 2016.

Things started to look a little better in Q2, where were 10 venture-backed companies that went public, a 67 percent increase quarter-to-quarter. However, IPO activity is still nowhere near where it was a year ago, when there were more than 30 IPOs raising over $2.5 billion in Q2 of 2015.

There's no indication from Nutanix about when it plans to jumpstart the IPO process again, but the additions of PernixData and Cloud.io shows that the company wants to put itself in the best position possible when it finally does. 

"The acquisitions of Calm.io and PernixData are completely independent of any IPO process and have no impact on any plans," the spokesperson from Nutanix told me. 

Nutanix had raised $317.6 million in funding, including a $140 million Series E funding round in August of 2014. Investors include Blumberg Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures.

VatorNews reached out to PernixData and Calmo.io for more information. We will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: virtualizedgeek.com)