VMware announced today that it's buying data center cloud management company Arkin Net to enhance its NSX network virtualization platform and software defined data center (SDDC) business.

Terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Since its inception in 2013, Arkin has raised $22 million in two funding rounds. The company has less than 50 employees.

Arkin’s software, which uses natural-language search that can index data, will make NSX faster to deploy and easier to operate in large scale production environments, says Milin Desai, VP of product management in VMware’s networking and security business unit.

“You’ll be able to point to a specific part of the data center and almost search like Google and get all the context of that app and do things with it,” he says.

Arkin will also boost security for NSX. The Arkin platform provides insights into the data center traffic flows via a pre-assessment tool that enables faster NSX deployments via microsegmentation planning.

“Arkin instruments the data coming out of NSX and creates a map of the data center,” says Desai. “It then says ‘based on these conversations, here are some logical ways to group these conversations and then secure them.’”

Nearly 100 percent of Arkin’s customers are already NSX customers, and in fact, Arkin’s cloud management platform was built specifically for NSX. Arkin formed about a year into when NSX was starting to gain momentum, and the startup decided to market its technology along with NSX, says Desai.

VMware saw something purpose-built for NSX and decided to bring it in-house, he says.

After the close of the acquisition, expected in the second quarter of 2016, Arkin would join VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit.