In brief: VMware intents to buy Avi Networks, the startup that raised US$115M

VMware is trying to reinvent itself from a company that builds and manages virtual machines in your data center to one that manages your virtual machines wherever they live, whether that’s on prem or the public cloud.
The company announced today that it was buying Avi Networks, a six-year-old startup that helps companies balance application delivery in the cloud or on prem.
Avi Networks claims to be the modern alternative to load-balancing appliances designed for another age when applications didn’t change much and lived on prem in the company data center.
As businesses move more workloads to public clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, Avi Networks is providing a more modern load-balancing tool, that not only balances software resource requirements based on location or need, but also tracks the data behind these requirements.
The company has been trying to find ways to help businesses manage their infrastructure, whether it is in the cloud or on prem, in a consistent way, and Avi Networks is another step in helping them do that on the monitoring and load-balancing side of things, at least.
Among Avi Networks’s clients, which will now become part of VMware, are Deutsche Bank, Telegraph Media Group, Hulu, as well as Cisco.
The company was founded in 2012 and raised US$115 million, according to Crunchbase.
Their investors included Greylock, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, among others.