Another AIOps vendor gets snapped up - Following on from Virtual Instruments deal to buy Metricly, Resolve have now acquired Fixstream.

It’s a sure sign that a particular market is reaching a point of maturity when IPOs and acquisitions start to spike upwards. The market in question here is AIOps. I have already posted in the past couple of weeks about Dynatrace and Virtual Instruments. Now I have to turn my attention to Wednesday’s acquisition of AIOps vendor, Fixstream, by infrastructure automation specialist Resolve.

The main objective for Resolve appears to have been to gain access to Fixstream’s AI capabilities. However, they are also inheriting, what appears to be, a fairly significant set of infrastructure monitoring and management capabilities. I say apparently, because I have not been able to verify the functionality and sophistication of their Meridian solution. I aim to recitify that in fairly short order.

The ability to map applications and business services to the underlying hardware infrastructure that supports them is potentially very powerful. In Bloor’s view, this a critical requirement for ensuring the performance, and not just the availability, of business-critical apps and services. Some commentators have called this Fixstream capability unique. The capability is unusual, but it is not unique. A small number of vendors like Uila and Virtual Instruments can do this.

Strikingly, both companies have very strong orientation towards the network market. Fixstream’s founders are ex-Cisco employees and a quick look at the user base and case studies of Resolve shows a preponderance of network operators. This is no bad thing, but it may be that features and functions in the server and storage monitoring area are not as developed. Most AIOps companies have converged on the AIOps space from a background in either, network, application, security or server and storage performance management. Each tends to have more developed capabilities in their “home” specialism.

Neither company is large, the $24 million sale price points to this. This is not a criticism as both are very young; Resolve having been founded in 2008 and Fixstream in 2013. However, I believe Resolve should bring a level of start-up nous that was perhaps lacking in Fixstream given the corporate background of their founders and, probably more importantly, the majority investment of TechMahindra. I’m not sure tech start-ups and systems integrators have a mutually compatible business culture.

Given what I can see of the functionality of Fixstream’sMeridian solution, the new merged organisation is one to watch in the AIOps space. How Resolve integrates Fixstream and helps accelerate sales to reach a point where it is profitable will be critical success factors to watch in the next couple of years.