SolarWinds Acquires Cloud Monitoring Company Librato for $40 Million

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This article originally appeared at the WHIR

As cloud adoption continues to increase to a predicted $127-$200 billion market in 2018, service providers are looking for a strategic edge. SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) believes the acquisition of the cloud monitoring company Librato will give them an advantage. On Thursday, SolarWinds acquired San Francisco-based Librato for $40 million.

Librato leverages data analytics to offer insights into cloud usage. Data analytics of all kinds are a big trend in the cloud, as identified in a recent WHIR podcast.

“We believe that as the world moves towards web-scale applications, continuous deployment and intelligent, internet-connected devices, the ability to capture, analyze, query and act on time-series data in real time becomes mission-critical for every organization,” Librato CEO Fred van den Bosch said in a blog post. “We also believe that when a need becomes this universal and data volumes this big, the best answer is a scalable, application agnostic platform with open APIs and an active user community. It allows organizations to extract the most value from their data and to have access to a broad range of application-specific solutions.”

Just a few months ago, SolarWinds made a similar strategic purchase of Pingdom to allow SolarWinds to extend its on-premise IT management to web application performance management. The company’s goal is to offer solutions for monitoring and management of cloud-based applications and infrastructure. The Librato acquisition addresses the infrastructure component by extending performance management capabilities to the cloud.

“As we evaluate the growth of the business-critical application, we see three ‘horizons’ of application deployment that require robust performance management — on-premise IT, IT as a service, and IT in the cloud,” SolarWinds CEO and president Kevin Thompson said. “We expect that the requirement to manage existing on-premise infrastructure will continue, but will now be coupled with the need to manage the performance of infrastructure and applications either fully or partially deployed in private and public clouds.”

Thompson also said that SolarWinds will continue to expand its offerings to take advantage of new opportunities this year. One of those opportunities could be boosting its internal threat monitoring capabilities, as the company continues to see insider data leakage and theft grow.

SolarWinds released its financial results for 2014 as well, showing strong growth in licensing and subscription revenue. Total revenue for Q4 2014 reached a record high of $118.4 million, representing a 22 percent year-over-year growth, the company said.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/solarwinds-acquires-cloud-monitoring-company-librato-40-million