Virtualization software giant VMware Inc. announced late Tuesday its intent to acquire networking analytics startup Nyansa Inc. for an undisclosed price.

VMware said it’s buying Nyansa chiefly for its “AIOps platform,” called Nyansa Voyance, which consolidates networking telemetry from various hardware providers and funnels it into a single dashboard for easy analysis. The approach does away with the need to buy proprietary network monitoring tools from providers such as Cisco Systems Inc.

In a blog post, Sanjay Uppal, vice president and general manager of VMware’s VeloCloud business unit, said the plan is to take Nyansa’s technology and use it to deliver better monitoring, network visibility and remediation on its VeloCloud software-defined wide area network platform. That should make it easier for VeloCloud’s customers to troubleshoot disruptions to their networks, or issues with application performance, Uppal said.

“Nyansa is a proven solution that solves many of the shortcomings of today’s vendor-specific solutions,” Uppal said in a statement. “Users have access to a single platform that can deliver comprehensive and actionable data on network traffic and application performance from the cloud, to branch offices, to the end user and across their wired and/or wireless devices.”

Uppal added that Nyansa’s technology would be critical to enabling networks that can handle massive “internet of things” deployments.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE he wasn’t surprised to see VMware buy Nyansa because AI is becoming increasingly important as a game-changer. He said Nyansa’s technology in particular has the potential to go beyond SD-WAN.

“AI is the key technology for enterprises that want to enable autonomous software operations, where their software infrastructure monitors and runs itself,” Mueller said.

Nyansa had raised $27 million in venture capital funding prior to the acquisition, including $15 million in its most recent, Series B round in January 2018. The company claims it analyzes network traffic for more than 20 million client devices, counting the likes of Tesla Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., General Electric Co. and Stanford University among its customers.

VMware said the deal is expected to close in February or March.

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