Splunk to buy DevOps incident management firm VictorOps for $120m

Move fits with Splunk's strategy of broadening its enterprise use cases

Machine data analytics firm Splunk is to acquire VictorOps, an operations automation company focused on helping DevOps teams manage incidents more quickly.

Boulder, Colorado-based VictorOps was co-founded in 2012 by CEO Todd Vernon together with Dan Jones and Bryce Ambraziunas who all previously worked at Raindance Communications.

The company, which currently has around 100 employees, specialises in incident management software designed for DevOps operations, including forensics alerts and remediation.

The thinking behind the acquisition, according to a press release from Splunk, is to apply AI and machine learning to monitoring, event management and incident management data.

"The combination of Splunk Enterprise and VictorOps will deliver a ‘Platform of Engagement'- combining monitoring, event management, on-call management and ChatOps. Ultimately, this enables modern engineering and operations teams to quickly solve problems in high-velocity deployment environments to maximise customer success," the statement says.

For VictorOps, Vernon said: "We founded VictorOps to give teams a naturally collaborative way to quickly resolve incidents. By combining VictorOps incident management capabilities and the Splunk platform, organisations will be able to quickly resolve and even help prevent issues that degrade customer engagement."

Splunk will acquire VictorOps for a total of $120m in cash plus Splunk securities. The acquisition is expected to close during Splunk's fiscal second quarter, subject to the usual conditions.

Back in 2016 Splunk CEO Doug Merritt anounced his plans to expand the reach of the company into other areas of analytics.

"As you are working with this enterprise machine-data fabric, you are going to want to explore, experience and play with data of all labels. Of course, [that will not just include] IT operations data and security data, but also sales data, marketing data, manufacturing, distribution, customer service and support," he said at the time.

Other recent acquisitions by Splunk include security orchestration firm Phantom for $350m in April 2018, selected assets of Rocana, a privately held analytics company, SignalSense a cloud-based data collection and breach detection solutions provider, and Drastin, a voice-enabled search-based collaborative analytics company.