A business strategy based on virtual machines has paid off for Shenick, which is being acquired by Aeroflex, SDxCentral has learned.

The deal hasn't been announced, but it seems likely to come up on Friday morning, when Aeroflex report its second-quarter earnings. We don't know the purchase price yet, and Aeroflex probably won't say; given that Aeroflex is a $647 million-a-year company, Shenick and its 60 employees probably count as “non-material.” (No offense, guys.)

For about a year, privately held Shenick has been focusing its business on TeraVM, a traffic emulator and test-and-measurement tool that can keep track of the performance of every flow — a level of granularity other tools lack, Jefferson says. True to the name, TeraVM runs in a virtual machine on any major hypervisor (Shenick spells out ESXi, Hyper-V, and KVM).

The product has gotten some attention — Shenick is the exclusive testing partner for the CloudNFV initiative for network functions virtualization (NFV), for instance — but Aeroflex's added heft should get Shenick more attention in service-provider circles, says Tim Jefferson, Shenick's vice president of global sales.

TeraVM came out in 2012 with a “smash the box” marketing campaign that emphasized, among other things, the ability to scale a virtual appliance at will. Multiple TeraVMs can aggregate into a single large emulator, for instance.

It was a departure for Shenick, a 12-year-old company whose flagship product had been diversifEye, an appliance-based emulation system. Under competition with Ixia and Spirent, Shenick ended up selling diversifEye into proprietary environments that the bigger companies didn't support, Jefferson says.

To staff up the TeraVM sales effort, Shenick recruited Josh Jansen, who had been responsible for the Cisco account at Spirent, in January 2013. Jefferson, another former Spirent employee, came to Shenick a few months later.

About 56 percent of Aeroflex's revenues come from microelectronics: semiconductors, wireless-network radio components, and the like. The rest comes from Aeroflex's test-equipment business, of which about half the revenues come from wireless test equipment.

Aeroflex had 2,700 employees as of June 30, according to its SEC filings.

(UPDATE 2/7/14: Yep, they announced it. There's no purchase price noted in the release, but Aeroflex's earnings release notes that Shenick's 2013 revenues were $9.6 million.)