Nexus Backed Arkin Gets Acquired By Cloud Infrastructure Firm VMware

Arkin, Pune and the US based data center and cloud infrastructure management company, has been acquired by VMware, a virtualization and cloud infrastructure firm. The terms and amount of the deal remain undisclosed. The transaction is expected to get closed in 2nd quarter of 2016.

Post acquisition, Arkin is expected to join VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit, a team of people responsible for VMware’s vRealize Management Suite. It was already a NSX partner with VMware since 2015. VMware NSX is a network virtualisation platform launched during VMworld. The software is reportedly able to operate using any hypervisor and most networking hardware.

Arkin was launched three years ago by three IITians, Shiv Agarwal, Rohit Toshniwal and Mukul Gupta, with an advisory board that consisted of industry luminaries including Alan Cohen (CCO at Illumio and formerly VP Marketing at Nicira), Dheeraj Pandey (Founder and CEO, Nutanix) and Denis Murphy (VP Sales, Nimble Storage).

It was launched with an aim to remove barriers to software-defined data center (SDDC) adoption by providing a radically simple and collaborative approach to operations. With a Google Search-like experience, Arkin platform enabled organisations to rapidly search, analyse, share, and collaborate across virtual and physical layers of their infrastructure. The platform could be deployed on-premise or consumed as a service in the Arkin cloud (SaaS).

Last year, it also raised $15 Mn in Series B from Nexus Venture Partners, key strategic investors and industry veterans including B.V. Jagadeesh (formerly CEO at NetScaler). In November 2014, the company had raised $7 Mn from Nexus Venture Partners, B.V. Jagadeesh, Alan Cohen (Chief Commercial Officer of Illumio, Ex-VP Nicira) and Semil Shah of Haystack Fund. Nexus Venture Partner is the sole initial institutional investor in Arkin.

As said by Ajay Singh, Senior VP and GM, Management Suites Business Unit, VMware, IT teams today are struggling to understand the big picture of cloud management. The outdated legacy management tools designed for a single technology domain only see the disparate domains of network, storage and compute, and lack awareness of the topology and critical interconnections and dependencies of the complex network.

“During the past few years, Arkin has developed a truly innovative approach to managing cloud environments — purpose-built for NSX, with simple and powerful new visualisation tools,”said Ajay.

He further added that with the acquisition of Arkin, and through the integration of vRealize Suite, cloud management teams will have access to a new generation of planning, troubleshooting and automation tools that provide visibility and control across the entire data center environment.

“While it is an amazing success for the Arkin team and great return for all investors, we will miss participating in building out the technology platform that is transforming the modus operandi of IT infrastructure. VMware is a great partner for Arkin, since they understand this need and will be able to fully leverage the technology and the work that has been done to date,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners.

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