Nutanix acquires Calm.io and PernixData in a busy weekend of acquisitions

Twin acquisitions the culmination of nine months of planning and talks

Nutanix has announced the acquisition of two companies over the weekend as it bids to flesh out its cloud platform. The company has taken over PernixData and Calm.io as as it seeks to deliver its "vision for the enterprise cloud".

"These additions will enable Nutanix to pioneer new software stacks for storage-class memory systems, enhance its application mobility fabric (AMF) with cross-cloud workload migration and bring rich, cloud-inspired orchestration and workflow automation to its Prism management software," the company claimed in its announcement.

PernixData was only founded in February 2012. It specialises in storage virtualisation software enabling organisations to scale storage performance independent of capacity, along with associated analytics. The company's software is used in the building and management of virtualised data centres.

Calm.io, meanwhile, is the developer of a DevOps automation platform, and will add application and service orchestration technology to the company's offerings, as well as runtime lifecycle management and policy-based governance across environments.

Both PernixData and Calm.io offered technology that Nutanix needed, but didn't have.

"PernixData and Calm.io both have exceptional technology, solid engineering teams, and visionary leaders with the ‘Founder's Mentality'; they have dreamt big and persevered against great odds to build phenomenal products," said Nutanix founder, CEO and chairman Dheeraj Pandey.

The aim of the two acquisitions is to enable Nutanix to flesh out its offerings to better enable it to offer the ‘hyper-convergence' of cloud and on-premise software. The acquisitions of the two companies indicates Nutanix's ambitions to become a major player in cloud, rather than primping itself for an acquisition, either by private equity or by one of the giants of cloud computing.

Nutanix competes with a range of companies, including Cisco, EMC and HPE.

Engineering teams will be combined, which should be relatively straightforward with both Nutanix and PernixData based in San Jose, California.

"PernixData and Nutanix share the architectural design philosophy that next-generation data centre fabrics must keep data and applications close in order to drive the fastest possible performance and to deliver flexible, cost-effective infrastructure scaling," said Sunil Potti, chief product and development officer at Nutanix in a blog posted as the news was announced.

He continued: "Server-side storage technologies are going to become 100-times faster with Intel's push towards NVMe [Non-Volatile Memory express device interface specification] and storage-class memory. While we bring applications and data together in the same servers, we have to hustle hard to get even closer to the CPU, provide a path for workload mobility across multiple cloud computing environments, and yet remain hypervisor-agnostic."

Although executed at the beginning of the month, the acquisitions were only announced over the weekend, and were the culmination of some nine months of talks. Investors in PernixData include Marc Benioff, the chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, as well as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Steve Luczo, chairman and CEO of Seagate Technology.

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