Dell set to snap up AIOps platform Moogsoft
"When implemented correctly, this will allow IT teams to become much more efficient and provide customers with faster resolution and great data insight", Dell Platinum Partner Gary McConnell said
Dell Technologies plans to acquire AIOps platform Moogsoft, a move that keeps pace with rivals Cisco, IBM and HPE, all of which have bought companies in recent years to build out those capabilities.
Cisco bought AppDynamics in 2017, while IBM purchased Instana in 2020, and in March HPE announced that it had purchased OpsRamp.
"I think these monster hardware platforms realise they need to offer a more complete picture to enterprise IT and not the way they used to," said David Tan, chief technology officer with CrushBank, an AI-powered MSP ticket-solving platform.
"They really need to bolt on modern solutions. Throw in the idea that it jams them into the AI conversation and it gets very interesting. Someone needs to emerge as a leader in AI observability and a lot of the recent deals feel like that's the direction these companies are going to fight it out!"
Gary McConnell, CEO of VirtuIT, a Nanuet, New York-based Dell Platinum partner said he is excited to see Dell invest in the continuous adoption of AI to empower its partners.
"The goal is to move away from mundane break-fix tasks, and adopt automation that can address issues that frequently arise, where we already have a known set of actions to remediate," he said.
"When implemented correctly, this will allow IT teams to become much more efficient and provide customers with faster resolution and great data insight."
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Both Dell and San Francisco-based Moogsoft declined to comment on the acquisition. Moogsoft has raised $92.9m in total funding and has 157 employees, according to Crunchbase and LinkedIn.
Dell said it would have more information should the deal close, which is expected to happen in Dell's third quarter which ends in the last week of October.
Tan — who spent years creating a machine-learning model that reads MSP tickets in ConnectWise, ServiceNow, Kaseya, Autotask, to deliver tier one techs with instant access to relevant historic tickets and documentation - praised Moogsoft for its ease of use, and explained some of its value to developers.
"They do a really good job of correlation and noise reduction," he told CRN. "It helps you focused on what's important. They also have one of the best APIs for custom integrations that I've seen in the space.
"This comes at the expense of less built-in canned integrations, but I personally like the flexibility of it being more API-based. They have a slick UI also. Makes it easy to see and understand what is happening."
Moogsoft says its anomaly detection platform works out of the box with no configuration required. It begins to detect anomalies on the system as soon as the source data is ingested, according to a video on the company's website, but it learns over time how the customer's data behaves to establish a baseline for what is "normal" for each system.
"Moogsoft algorithms automatically reduce the ‘haystack' of data to make anomalies obvious to DevOps practitioners and SREs," the company states. "The built-in processes of deduplication and correlation quickly find the needle: probable root cause of the issue degrading the customer experience."