Juniper Networks has announced that it will acquire a startup company called AppFormix at an undisclosed price. This acquisition is likely to give a big boost to Juniper’s cloud operations.

AppFormix is a cloud operations management and optimization company that was started in 2013 by Sumeet Singh, a former employee of Microsoft and Cisco. In fact, Singh started the Windows Azure team at Microsoft, and later quit the company, to pursue his own entrepreneurial interest. AppFormix works with any OpenStack or Kubernetes infrastructure to provide real-time insights into the health and operations of customers’ respective clouds. Built on big data analytics and machine learning, AppFormix  is redefining telemetry and cloud management with its features that include historic monitoring, visibility, and dynamic performance optimization for private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. As a result, this software has the power to create a self-driving infrastructure for every cloud.

Juniper Networks, headquartered in Sunnyvale California, was founded almost 20 years ago by Pradeep Sindhu. Today, it is a leader in routers, switches, security, and software, and is looking to establish a strong foothold in the cloud market as well. It already has a cloud product called Contrail that gives customers the platform to create, scale, and join together seamlessly different OpenStack clouds using the most secure and intelligent networks. The obvious advantage of these federated clouds is the reliability and flexibility that comes with combining different clouds, not to mention the benefits of speed, agility, and operational excellence to the organization.

Such a federated platform has helped Juniper to carve a niche for itself, and this is all set to get a boost with the acquisition of AppFormix. Specifically, the combination of Contrail and AppFormix will improve cloud security, accounting, planning, and implementation of cloud projects. As a result, customers will stand to gain a more secure, intelligent, and automatic operational excellence at a lot lesser cost. As for the company, such benefits are sure to translate to more happy customers.

Under the terms of the deal, AppFormix team will report directly to the CTO of Juniper Networks, Pradeep Sindhu. Also, AppFormix will continue to exist as a standalone brand, and will have the freedom to develop its own platform. No layoffs or changes are expected at this time, and both the companies believe that the formalities for closing the deal would be completed by the end of 2016.

This deal is another significant one not just for both the companies, but also for the cloud and networking industry at large, as analytics and machine learning can help companies to stay on top of their ever-growing networks. These tools are essential to keep pace with the unprecedented growth of networks. In this sense, the coming together of AppFormix and Contrail can give a lot to cheer.

Though current users may not see any changes right away, this acquisition is sure to augur well for Juniper’s customers in the future, as they can get the benefit of having an orchestrated monitoring system while connecting across different cloud environments.

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