A couple of weeks ago, during the VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage), VMware announced the acquisition of two companies: Integrien and TriCipher.
In both cases VMware didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition.
Both are strategic acquisitions, critical to deliver the cloud computing vision detailed on stage.
Integrien is a company focused on real-time performance analytics.
Their flagship product, Alive, analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure in a pretty unique way: for each tracked resource, it can identify the normal behavior of every metric (which implies a dynamic adjustment of thresholds) and then automatically recognize an anomaly.
Impressively enough, Alive can handle upwards of 10 million individual metrics every 5 minutes.
Alive is a next generation performance monitoring solution that VMware probably plans to integrate in its upcoming Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, just renamed vFabric, along with SpringSource tcServer, GemFire, RabbitMQ and Hyperic.
Interestingly, Alive integrates with a plethora of products, including Hyperic.
TriCipher instead is a company focused on identity management in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud computing.
Their flagship product, myOneLogin, fundamentally is a single sign-on (SSO) product: it works as an access broker to 4,000 public and virtual private SaaS clouds, mapping the enterprise user accounts to the cloud provider user accounts.
In this way companies can allow and most of all disallow the access to specific off-premises services, without the mess implied by creating hundreds if not thousands of new logins.
Because myOneLogin integrates with existing directory services, companies can assign SaaS applications in a very granular way, and can leverage strong authentication solutions already in place inside the company.
TriCipher competes with a number of other startups, including Symplified (read cloudcomputing.info coverage) and Okta (read cloudcomputing.info coverage).
VMware is already using the TriCipher technology in its project Horizon (formerly codename Origami): a web-based application provisioning portal that will seamlessly allow the user to access to View virtual desktops, streamed ThinApp virtualized applications, Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) remote desktops, as well as private and public SaaS cloud applications.
Project Horizon, which is a key component of the long-term VMware strategy for desktop virtualization, is still in its early stage, and VMware doesn’t plan to release it before next year.