Nutanix reached a $165 million deal to buy Mainframe2 (Frame), a cloud-based desktop virtualization and application delivery company.

While it already provides on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) via its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the Frame acquisition will allow Nutanix to offer cloud-delivered VDI, or desktops-as-a-service (DaaS). A Gartner report published in June forecasts that by 2019, half of all new VDI users will be deployed on DaaS platforms.

When the acquisition closes (Nutanix expects it to happen later this month), Frame will support one-click desktop instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. It plans to add support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Nutanix Xi Cloud, which is the company’s hybrid cloud offering.

“Launching Frame as a Nutanix Xi Service will be an exciting step in this journey, and we look forward to disrupting yet another layer of the enterprise stack — to bring cloud scale desktops and apps, powered by a one-click user and admin experience to everyone,” wrote Raghu Nandan, general manager for virtualization and management, and Rajiv Mirani, CTO for cloud platforms, at Nutanix in a blog post.

San Mateo, California-based Frame, was founded in 2012, and has raised $28.5 million to date. It has about 100 employees.

Adobe, Siemens, VMware, Autodesk, KPF, and Bentley are some of Frame’s customers using the infrastructure-agnostic platform to deliver apps from the cloud.

Combining the two companies will “help Nutanix on its journey of becoming a cloud services company,” wrote Frame CEO Nikola Bozinovic in a blog post.

Nutanix has been scooping up software companies over the past few months as it transitions to a software-centric business model.

On March 1 it announced plans to buy multi-cloud management startup Minjar, which lets customers compare costs across public clouds. And 12 days later it inked a deal to acquire cloud app monitoring startup Netsil.

All three of these recent acquisitions will bolster Nutanix’s cloud software stack. The company has already launched a new SDN tool called Flow that uses technology acquired from its Netsil purchase. Flow now comes built into Nutanix's Enterprise Cloud OS software stack.

“The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS provides a cloud-like infrastructure stack (IaaS) similar to AWS — but with a more open approach so IT leaders can choose the right technology for each use case,” said Greg Smith, vice president of product and technical marketing at Nutanix, in an email. “With Frame, we will bring the same consumer-grade simplicity and openness to DaaS, addressing an unmet customer need to deliver desktops from multiple public clouds, and built with technology that was ‘born in the cloud.’ This acquisition will help us continue to grow [our] technology stack so our customers can get access to new services while still benefitting from our open approach.”