VMware today announced its intent to acquire AIOps provider Nyansa for an undisclosed sum, marking a sustained appetite for acquisitions following its $2.7 billion Pivotal purchase among others.

The software giant says Nyansa's technology will enable the company to deliver improved network visibility, monitoring, and remediation to its VeloCloud SD-WAN platform, making it easier for customers to operate and troubleshoot network disruptions, or application performance challenges.

The acquisition of Nyansa will also extend end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for both the LAN and WAN, according to Sanjay Uppal, co-founder of VeloCloud and head of VMware’s SD-WAN division.

“Nyansa is a proven solution that solves many of the shortcomings of today’s vendor-specific solutions," he said in a statement.

At the core of the acquisition is Nyansa's vendor-agnostic, AIOps platform, which can consolidate network telemetry from a variety of hardware vendors into a single dashboard, eliminating the need for proprietary monitoring tools like Cisco Prime, Aruba Airwave, or SolarWinds.

Nyansa claims to analyze network traffic from more than 20 million client devices across thousands of customer sites at companies including Tesla, Uber, GE Healthcare, San Francisco International Airport, and Stanford University.

Nyansa's multi-vendor compatibility made it particularly attractive for VMware because it would allow the company to extend its SD-WAN overlay deeper into the branch office without the need for customers to purchase additional hardware, said Steve Woo, VP of product and co-founder of VeloCloud, in a call with SDxCentral. "It basically extends our overlay approach," he said.

Woo expects to see Nyansa's technology offered as an add-on available to new and existing VeloCloud customers as well as a standalone product for customers with preexisting SD-WAN deployments.

In a blog post, Uppal lauded the capabilities that will be enabled by combining the two platforms. "Users have access to a single platform that can deliver comprehensive and actionable data on network traffic and application performance from the cloud, to branch offices, to the end user and across their wired and/or wireless devices," he wrote.

VMware also views AIOps as key to enabling network behavior that is critical to IoT deployments.

Nyansa CEO Abe Ankumah expressed his excitement for the acquisition in a statement, claiming that “Nyansa and VMware are perfectly aligned in technology, products, and culture."

While VMware declined to say when Nyansa's features would start showing up in VeloCloud, Woo did say that the two products' "synergies" mean the integration shouldn't be a difficult one.

The deal is expected to close sometime between February and March.