VMware to buy Digital Fuel to simplify cloud economics

VMware is to acquire Digital Fuel Technologies, a vendor of IT financial management software that helps companies determine the cost of IT services.

The terms of the acquisition, which is scheduled to close in July, were not announced.

VMware’s vice president of marketing, Ramin Sayar, said in a blog post that it decided to acquire the San Mateo, California, company to provide its customers with better tools to manage IT systems.

Digital Fuel says it provides enterprises with tools to measure the cost of their infrastructure and applications across a combination of public clouds, private clouds, or traditional environments. Business units can then be charged for their actual usage of IT applications and resources.

“With applications being moved from one VM (virtual machine) to another, VMs in turn being moved from one host to another, and capacity and usage being spun up and spun down constantly, the ability to capture and showback the resources and services consumed by your LOBs (lines of business) is incredibly and increasingly difficult,” Sayar said.

As demand picked up for its products and services, it became clear for Digital Fuel that the best way to continue providing its customers with the best products and services would be to team up with a larger company, said Yisrael Dancziger, president and CEO of Digital Fuel, in a blog post.

Digital Fuel’s team including Dancziger will continue to work at VMware.

VMware, a virtualisation and cloud infrastructure provider, has been filling up its portfolio by acquisitions. It said in May that it had acquired Socialcast, a provider of social collaboration technology for the enterprise, which can be delivered as a hosted service, private cloud implementation, or through an on-premise deployment. It also signed a definite agreement in May to acquire Shavlik Technologies, a provider of cloud-based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses. In April, it acquired SlideRocket, a SaaS-based business presentation provider.