Multi-cloud management is a major growth opportunity for vendors and MSPs, especially as customers move workloads across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and various hybrid cloud models.
Among the startups in the market: Minjar, which develops Botmetric for automated financial governance and compliance management across multi-cloud environments. Minjar’s other cloud solutions SmartAssist Assurance and SmartAssist Managed Cloud also help enterprises embrace the cloud effectively and optimize their multi-cloud environments for performance and cost, the company claims.
Botmetric has enjoyed high ratings on the current AWS marketplace, and enterprise technology companies have taken notice. Chief among them: Nutanix, an enterprise cloud computing company, which has swooped in to acquire Minjar. Financial terms were not disclosed. It sounds like a small tuck-in deal, since the transaction was not material to the Nutanix balance sheet, according to CFO Duston Williams.
Nutanix, Minjar & Botmetric Further Explained
Though small, the deal sounds strategic. Through this acquisition, Nutanix hopes to further accelerate the company's vision of “One OS. One-Click. Any Cloud” with intelligent cloud management as part of Enterprise Cloud OS software. Nutanix will use Minjar’s technology to improve its Calm automation and lifecycle management product, as well as Xi Cloud Services, a native extension to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software.
Further explaining the deal during last week's Nutanix earnings call, CEO Dheeraj Pandey said:
"If you think about Calm -- that’s about orchestration across multiple clouds, and it’s closer to developers and DevOps as the end user. Now, Minjar actually sits right next to and complements the multi-cloud layer with its costing, budgeting, governance and compliance feature sets. We believe that in the next three to five years as the world goes more and more towards multi-cloud, we’ll talk about hyperconvergence of all these clouds. It will require a control plane that includes Calm, Minjar and many future different pieces that need to fit together in the puzzle itself. That’s what Minjar really is. They have couple of other things, one of which is managed service that they’ve actually done to improve a migration of an on-prem customer to an off-prem customer and we’d be using that for Xi Cloud as well."
Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Competition Intensifies
Nutanix remains in growth mode but competition certainly continues to intensify. The company's revenues were $286.7 million for Q2 2018, up 44 percent from Q2 2017, according to results released last week. Large-scale deals also increased, with 57 customers signing contracts worth $1 million or more, up 104 percent from the corresponding quarter in fiscal 2017.
Still, the hyperconverged infrastructure market is fiercely competitive. Key rivals include Cisco Systems' SpringPath, HP Enterprise's SimpliVity, and Dell EMC's close collaboration with VMware.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
