Splunk to Acquire DevOps Alert Firm VictorOps for $120 Million
12.6.18 securityweek  IT

Machine data solutions firm Splunk announced Monday that it has agreed the acquisition of alert management start-up VictorOps for approximately $120 million. The acquisition is expected to close during Splunk's FQ2, subject to customary closing conditions, and will be funded by cash out of Splunk's balance sheet.

The acquisition makes sense. Splunk uses data analytics and artificial intelligence to locate alert incidents within masses of log data. VictorOps manages the delivery of alerts to the right on-call technical staff. Together, they combine data analytics with DevOps practices.

"The world is changing," explains VictorOps' CEO and co-founder Todd Vernon in an associated blog. "Companies are increasingly relying on software for their competitive advantage in business. Software that historically changed a few times a year, now changes hourly or even by the minute in progressive, market-savvy companies."

VictorOps was founded to provide a collaborative way to quickly resolve software incidents. "By combining VictorOps incident management capabilities and the Splunk platform," Vernon continued, "organizations will be able to quickly resolve and even help prevent issues that degrade customer engagement. We look forward to joining Splunk and working together to help solve these complex challenges facing every Development and DevOps team."

"The combination of machine data analytics and artificial intelligence from Splunk with incident management from VictorOps creates a 'Platform of Engagement' that will help modern development teams innovate faster and deliver better customer experiences," added Doug Merritt, president and CEO at Splunk. The intention is the integration of Splunk Enterprise with VictorOps will deliver monitoring, event management, on-call management and ChatOps.

'Platform of engagement' is also the term used by VictorOps. "Modern Incident Management," wrote Vernon, "is in a period of strategic change where data is king, and insights from that data are key to maintaining a market leading strategy. We look forward to working together to create a 'Platform of Engagement' that uses the most actionable information available and correlates monitoring and incident management data to foster shared understanding, speed resolution, and leverage AI to recommend solutions."

The acquisition of VictorOps builds on the earlier $350 million acquisition of Phantom. While Phantom also helps automate IT teams' responses to alerts, it lacks VictorOps' team collaboration capabilities.

VictorOps was founded in 2012 by Bryce Ambraziunas, Dan Jones and Todd Vernon. In 2016 it raised $15 million in Series B funding, bringing the total funding raised to $33.7 million. Investors include Silicon Valley firms Shea Ventures and Costanoa Ventures.

San Francisco, CA-based Splunk was founded in 2003. VictorOps is its seventh acquisition, including Phantom earlier this year, and SignalSense in October 2017. Both Phantom and VictorOps had a year-long product integration partnership with Splunk prior to acquisition.

"Upon close," wrote Vernon, "VictorOps will join Splunk's IT Markets group and together will provide on-call technical staff an analytics and AI-driven approach for addressing the incident lifecycle, from monitoring to response to incident management to continuous learning and improvement."

Splunk plans to retain VictorOps approximately 90 employees after the acquisition.