Virtana achieves record bookings and customer growth

In August 2019, Virtana announced the acquisition of the Metricly SaaS-based cloud cost, optimisation and monitoring platform. The acquisition enabled the company to expand its cloud migration, monitoring and analytics portfolio to offer customers SaaS-based, hybrid infrastructure management across multi-cloud environments.

Virtana also advanced its business model to include self-service SaaS and downloadable trial versions of its solutions. Virtana launched new versions of its flagship hybrid infrastructure management solutions, VirtualWisdom and WorkloadWisdom, and announced CloudWisdom, a new product based on technology from Metricly, which offers groundbreaking, SaaS-based cloud cost optimisation and monitoring. Virtana now offers the industry’s only integrated platform for monitoring, capacity and cost planning and workload automation. 

Building on its momentum, Virtana formed several strategic partnerships and announced partner programme enhancements that position the company’s global ecosystem for greater growth in 2020. 

First Fully AI-Powered Hybrid Infrastructure Management and AIOps Platform 

Today’s enterprises are increasingly embracing a hybrid infrastructure model in order to meet the needs of a wide range of application workloads. However, the complexity of today’s highly virtualised, hybrid and multi-cloud environments creates significant management and automation challenges for IT infrastructure and operations teams. 

Building on its deep expertise in AI-powered analytics, Virtana designed its entire solutions portfolio around an AIOps methodology, which makes profound improvements in enabling IT managers to visualise, monitor, analyse and optimise the health, performance, capacity and efficiency of their infrastructure within the context of the application.

“EMA research consistently underscores the requirements to link performance, capacity and cost analysis across all IT infrastructure and application environments, especially when cloud migration and cloud optimisation play a role,” said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. “Managing these factors proactively can pave the way forward for digital transformation, especially when they are effectively associated with business-related outcomes. Virtana’s unique and evolving portfolio addresses these requirements directly, and as such, is distinctively well positioned to help its customers accelerate critical business initiatives in cloud and hybrid cloud context.”  

Product Launches and Upgrades

In October 2019, Virtana announced the launch of CloudWisdom, a SaaS platform that reduces the cost and risk of operating public cloud infrastructure. CloudWisdom optimises public cloud computing and capacity by recommending configurations unique to application workloads using machine learning algorithms. This capability enables customers to avoid performance bottlenecks and overprovisioning commonly associated with environments hosted in the public cloud. Tightly integrated with VirtualWisdom, CloudWisdom features full-stack, cloud-native monitoring from a single pane of glass. 

In the second half of 2019, Virtana made significant updates to VirtualWisdom, the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid infrastructure management and AIOps platform. The latest platform provides deeper infrastructure visibility, simplified capacity management, and better control of infrastructure costs.  Key new features include the Workload RightSizer, Workload Drift Analyser, and Capacity Auditor.

Virtana also introduced WisdomPacks, a set of vendor-agnostic integration packages designed to make it easier for partners to deliver comprehensive AI-powered IT monitoring and optimisation offerings tailored to the needs of its enterprise customers.WisdomPacks dramatically simplify the deployment process of VirtualWisdom by packaging key capabilities, best practice alerting and investigations to improve knowledge, visibility, discovery and monitoring across any environment.

Customer Relationships

Virtana drove substantial growth in new customers in 2019, with the strongest gains in the healthcare, financial services, and cloud service provider markets. Virtana’s customer portfolio now includes more than 50 of the largest U.S.-based healthcare organisations and more than 40 of the world’s leading financial institutions. The company’s customer base also includes major global brands in manufacturing, insurance, energy and utilities, retail and customer services, telco and service providers, business services, and technology.

Strategic Partnerships and Industry Collaboration

Virtana significantly strengthened its partner ecosystem and its channel-led business in 2019. Channel-led revenue has more than doubled 2019-over-2018, following programme enhancements by Virtana to drive higher partner margins and simplify product deployments.

In June 2019, Virtana announced that it had joined the AppDynamics Integration Partner Programme (IPP). The IPP leverages integration of the IPP members’ technologies with AppDynamics to deliver an AIOps ecosystem that ensures application service delivery in a hybrid and multi-cloud world.

At Dell Technologies World, Virtana, Dell EMC, Cisco and SANBlaze demonstrated how the four companies have collaborated to accelerate enterprise adoption of the non-volatile memory express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage protocol.  

Channel Accolades

In April 2019, CRN awarded Virtana a 5-Star rating in its 2019 Partner Programme Guide, which identifies the strongest and most successful partner programmes in IT products and services. The honour marked Virtana’s third consecutive 5-Star rating by CRN.

CRN also named Paul Brodie, Virtual Instruments’ Vice President of Global Channel Sales, to its prestigious list of 2019 Channel Chiefs, which recognises top IT channel leaders who continually strive to drive growth and revenue in their organisation through their channel partners.

Common Criteria Certification

Also in 2019, VirtualWisdom completed the Common Criteria certification process. By achieving the certification, Virtana provides critical security assurance to customers in highly regulated industries, including federal government, financial services and healthcare.

“2019 continued to be another year of strong growth and customer adoption for Virtana,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO of Virtana. “The year also marked an industry inflection point as enterprises recognised that the scale and complexity of their hybrid infrastructures was outpacing their ability to manage them. Leading IT organisations realise there is a critical need for better AI-powered analytics and automation that can improve the efficiency and agility of their IT operations teams. With support from Virtana, enterprises can now stay several steps ahead of their mounting challenges by proactively optimising their infrastructure investments while meeting their application performance and availability requirements.”

“Our substantial growth in adding new customers has been fuelled by our channel partners,” stated Sheen Khoury, Executive Vice-president of Global Sales. “They have witnessed the clear need for our innovative hybrid infrastructure management and cloud migration offerings, which have become very strategic and profitable for our committed partners.”