VMware quietly acquires Sunnyvale, California-based PacketMotion.
August 27, 2011
Today, VMware quietly announced its acquisition of Sunnyvale, California-based PacketMotion. The ultimate significance of this purchase is realized in Dean Coza’s whisper-soft blog entry announcing the transaction. This action removes virtualization and cloud computing adoption fears for the companies that are still holding out on making the move from physical to virtual due to security concerns. PacketMotion’s products audit all activities that occur between users and computing resources. No user makes a move in a PacketSentry protected environment without the Sentry knowing about it…
PacketSentry is an agentless solution that is unobtrusive and won’t clog up your network with extra monitoring or alerting traffic.
Joel Ferman, Director of Products & Programs, PacketMotion told me that, “The acquisition has exciting implications – pairing our security, control and visibility functionality with VMWare’s product line.”
PacketMotion is VMware’s final tap in its checkmate move toward total domination in the virtualization market. And, then there’s cloud computing.
How, you ask?
By providing a solid, secure solution to businesses that have held off from moving to a virtualized infrastructure, cloud-based computing or virtual desktop infrastructure, there’s no more excuses. And, VMware has the key to it all: PacketSentry.
With the recent media hype over groups like Anonymous and LulzSec who’ve compromised millions of user accounts, taken down services and exposed security flaws in high-profile computing environments, security is a primary cause for concern.
This is the solution that VMware needed to complete its portfolio and make good on its promise of better security in virtualized environments. PacketMotion places VMware in an extremely strategic position in the world’s data centers as a serious cloud computing contender. Until now, the bulk of cloud computing solutions have been dominated by Amazon.com, which uses Xen as its underlying hypervisor.
This acquisition should provide the impetus for a major provider to go head-to-head with Amazon in the public cloud market. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Amazon seriously considers a switch to VMware because of its cloud computing market position and the need for extreme security in that space. Any competitor worth its salt that uses VMware will use the security hook as a big selling point for its services.