VMware buys B-hive Networks

VIRTUALISATION COMPANY VMware today announced its acquisition of B-hive networks, a privately-held application performance management software company.

B-hive Networks, which has its headquarters in San Mateo, California and its main R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel will now help VMware provide punters with proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running on VMware virtual machines.

The acquisition means that B-hive's Israeli R&D will become VMware's newest development centre.

VMware's chief technology officer, Stephen Herrod, Ph.D reckoned that because B-hive has an agentless, virtual appliance-based approach, it pips the others to the post when it comes to monitoring, as it can, "proactively manage application performance to specified levels". He added: "These
capabilities, combined with VMware's proven virtualisation platform, can allow our customers to consistently deliver on their application service level objectives."

B-hive, founded in 2005, apparently gives increased visibility into application performance in virtual environments like end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilisation and cross-virtual machine dependencies.

Setting itself aside from OS-based performance monitoring products, B-hive purportedly measures performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications, distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines.

CEO and co-founder of B-hive, Yoav Dembak, said in a press release that the company's technology was garnering importance, "as customers move from the physical to virtual." He added: "We expect the B-hive R&D team to be an integral part of our new development centre in Israel." µ