Virtual Instruments Rebrands to Virtana to Reflect Its New Hybrid Cloud AIOps Play

Virtual Instruments has changed its name to Virtana, reflecting a new focus to provide enterprises an integrated set of AI-powered tools to monitor and manage their on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based deployments.

The rebranding, announced Monday, comes two months after the San Jose-based company acquired Software-as-a-Service provider Metricly, a cloud cost optimization and performance monitoring tool.

Virtana is working to integrate the Metricly tool, now called CloudWisdom, with its flagship VirtualWisdom infrastructure monitoring software built for on-premises deployments. The result will be a unified tool that will allow companies to monitor and manage their on-premises and cloud deployments through a cloud-based single pane of glass, Virtana CEO Philippe Vincent told Data Center Knowledge.

“Hybrid infrastructure management is about offering a unified approach to manage IT operations across hybrid clouds,” he said “This is what our customers have asked for, and this is where we are aiming the company.”

Virtana competes in the emerging AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT operations) market that uses Big Data analytics and machine learning to automate IT operations and processes.

As enterprises migrate to a hybrid cloud architecture, they need integrated tools to monitor and proactively manage their internal data centers, private clouds, and public cloud environments, analysts say. Virtana’s competitors in the space include vendors like LogicMonitor, ScienceLogic, and Zenoss.

Related:Virtual Instruments Buys Metricly to Marry IT Ops in the Data Center to DevOps in the Cloud

“Virtana is one of the few who can span the whole scope from the very low level of on-premise infrastructure and storage to the high levels of apps in the cloud,” said George Crump, lead analyst at Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm focused on storage, virtualization, and cloud marketplaces. “They have a good strategy. It will require some patience to set up.”

Virtana’s Product Strategy

While Virtana doesn’t do full IT automation yet, Vincent believes the company is well positioned to compete in the AIOps market by having what he described as a best-of-breed private cloud infrastructure monitoring tool in VirtualWisdom and a cloud monitoring tool in CloudWisdom.

Vincent said CloudWisdom is perfect for the company as it moves from its heritage of on-premises monitoring software to supporting hybrid cloud.

The machine learning-powered VirtualWisdom software allows companies to monitor and manage health and performance of their in-house IT infrastructure, such as servers, storage, and networks. It provides deep, real-time visibility between applications and infrastructure and through analytics determine causes of performance issues and recommend fixes, such as moving virtual machines to another server or load balancing storage, Vincent explained.

“We bridge the gap between infrastructure and application management,” he said.  

Meanwhile, CloudWisdom uses machine learning algorithms to analyze workloads in public cloud environments and enable users to proactively manage performance, plan for capacity, and optimize costs.

“They were essentially our long lost cousin,” Vincent said. “It not only brings the capabilities of cost modeling and monitoring for performance and risk, but it gives us the cloud platform we need to build the future of our product.”

Virtana plans to have the integrated, single-pane-of-glass management tool ready to hit the market by next year, the CEO said. To ease the integration, the company has rewritten the VirtualWisdom application using containers.

As for the company’s new name, the “VI” in Virtana stands for Virtual instruments, while the rest stands for “real-time analytics and automation.” The company rebranded itself because the Virtual Instruments name no longer reflected what the company has become and where it’s going in the future, he explained.

“We want to have a fresh conversation with our existing customers and say, ‘Look. We renamed ourselves. This is a big deal. We’ve transformed to embrace these new problems in these new areas,’” he said. “We also wanted to have a new brand to introduce ourselves to new customers because we are a growing company. A lot of what we are doing now is to acquire new customers.”