Redmond, Washington — US software monopolist Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it has acquired AVIcode, Inc., a Maryland-based private firm that delivers performance monitoring for applications and services on Microsoft’s .NET Framework, the companies announced Wednesday.
Microsoft said the Baltimore-based AVIcode, a privately held firm established in 1998, will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, with the software being delivered through the System Center product family.
Financial terms of the transaction were not revealed.
Microsoft said it intends to roll AVIcode’s technology into its System Center network management product and extend application performance management (APM) to the cloud. Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Management Security Division, said in a blog post that as more and more applications shifts to run from the cloud, organizations will want to have access to the capabilities that AVIcode imparts — empowering organizations to get a much deeper understanding of the actual end-user experience, with the details to:
Firstly, understand when performance and availability is not at the desired service level. And secondly, quickly diagnose where the root issues are that lead to latency within the service, resulting in a poor performance experience for the end-users.
Anderson said that the company has already been utilizing AVIcode’s product in its own data centers for some time. Furthermore, the XBox Live service management team has employed the software to view all the transaction times of all the components, as a way of spotting outages and slow performance.
“Integration of AVIcode technologies with System Center Operations Manager will help customers bridge the ‘management gap’ between existing, on-premises applications and those delivered via the cloud,” Microsoft said, “providing a comprehensive view of application performance, end user experience and the ability to respond more quickly to business needs.”
Incorporating the capabilities of Operations Manager with the improvements from AVIcode permits organizations to obtain the 360-degree view of their service — independent of where the service is hosted, whether a data center/cloud, in a partner’s hosted data center/cloud, or from a public cloud solution such as Windows Azure, Anderson said.
He explained that this acquisition “For Microsoft customers will mean that AVIcode will continue to execute its existing commitments to customers and also provide access to a new set of tools to better monitor their cloud-based .NET applications, to help you keep those business-critical data-center applications and services up and running as Microsoft transitions AVIcode to the Microsoft systems and processes,” according to a blog posting.
Mike Curreri, AVIcode’s CEO and president, said the acquisition is “exciting.” He said AVIcode and Microsoft “share a common vision about the evolution of application performance management and monitoring.”
“Our team has been continually impressed with Microsoft’s expansive vision for APM, its deep-rooted commitment to customer satisfaction and the consistent professionalism of all of its personnel,” he wrote in a blog post. “I look forward to watching the evolution of AVIcode’s technology within the System Center platform; and seeing its growing role in supporting business critical applications running in Azure’s cloud computing environment. There are exciting times ahead for application and end user monitoring.”
“With AVIcode’s technology, thousands of users worldwide have remarkably reduced the time required to diagnose and resolve application problems. AVIcode’s real-time detection, alerting and root cause diagnosis capabilities — from both the server and end user perspective — are unique, and when paired with a systems management solution like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, deliver unsurpassed visibility into the entire application environment, from the end user, across application tiers, and back,” Curreri added.
Moreover, this acquisition will offer new functionality to the System Center family of IT management capabilities and will help Microsoft offer a more complete solution to customers.
AVIcode’s software empowers organizations to monitor transactions and understand how well individual bits of hardware and software are supporting these transactions. Such information can then be used to more quickly diagnose problems. The software is already integrated with Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager software.
“As applications continue to leverage Web 2.0 technologies like Silverlight and become ever-more spread-out, and as the user audience for these applications also becomes more diverse, multiple points of failure are introduced into the application environment. Discovering, diagnosing and triaging failures at the moment they occur is challenging at best, painfully time-consuming and resource intensive at worst,” explained Curreri, in a blog post.
The acquisition is Microsoft’s first major one of the year. During the past 12 months, however, Microsoft has made about 15 small acquisitions, Marc Brown, managing director or corporate development, said last week.