VMware acquisition of Veriflow to bolster vRealize platform

VMware, which has been on a buying spree since late last year, plans to acquire network verification vendor Veriflow and roll the company's technology into VMware's vRealize platform for building and managing cloud computing environments.

The VMware acquisition, announced late last week, would lead to the integration of Veriflow into vRealize Network Insight, an on-premises product that provides a detailed look of network traffic for workloads running on public clouds and virtualized networks in the data center, executives said. VMware did not disclose financial details. 

vRealize Network Insight is one of several components in the vRealize Suite. Companies use Network Insight to create microsegmentation policies for NSX, VMware's virtualized networking technology.

Combining Veriflow with vRealize Network Insight should bring "richer capabilities as well as greater value in NSX deployments," said Brad Casemore, an analyst at IDC. Together, the technologies will help companies "preview the integrity of network design before it goes into production, but also to proactively identify and address potential issues that otherwise might result in service disruptions or security vulnerabilities."

Veriflow technology

Veriflow creates an interactive network model based on state data from physical or virtual firewalls, load balancers, routers and switches in the data center or public and private clouds. Network engineers run planned configuration and policy changes against the model to see the impact they would have on the network.

Veriflow competes with Forward Networks and Intentionet, which also let companies discover network problems that could arise following changes to infrastructure configurations or security policies.

Veriflow is a small company with "modest" revenue and a niche product that "ultimately needed to be part of a larger platform," said Casemore. The company has raised $11.1 million from venture capital firms since its founding in 2013.

VMware acquisitions

VMware has made a string of acquisitions since its $550 million purchase of Heptio in December 2018. Heptio provides software tools that help companies build production container deployments.

In July, VMware announced it would acquire Uhana, the creator of an AI engine that provides developers with predictive what-if modeling, along with detailed information on network operations. Earlier that month, VMware said it bought Bitfusion, which offers technology that increases the speed of computing workloads on virtualization platforms, such as VMware's vSphere.

In May, VMware said it would acquire Bitnami, which provides a catalog of popular open-source applications and technology stacks for multi-cloud deployments.

In August, VMware said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company and Pivotal Software had formed special committees to negotiate a sale of Pivotal to VMware. Pivotal provides software that helps developers build, run and deploy software on Kubernetes, a container orchestration platform.