Microsoft Acquires Application Management Service BlueStripe

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired BlueStripe, an application management service that helps enterprises monitor and troubleshoot applications that have been deployed across different operating systems, data centers and cloud environments. Microsoft says it will integrate the service into tools like System Center and the company’s Operations Management Suite (OMS).

As Microsoft notes, many of BlueStripe’s customers already use BlueStripe’s products to extend Microsoft’s own OMS to gain better insight into their infrastructure’s performance.

Microsoft will stop selling BlueStripe soon, as it starts to incorporate the service into its own products, but the company tells me that it will still support BlueStripe’s existing customers until then.

The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. According to CrunchBase, BlueStripe raised $13.5 million since it was founded in 2007. The last round was a $525,000 debt financing round in July 2014. Investors in the company’s $5 million Series A and $8 million Series B rounds include Trinity Ventures and Valhalla Partners.

According to Microsoft, BlueStripe helps enterprises monitor their IT at the infrastructure level so they can automatically discover and map the applications running on their networks and their dependencies. This makes it easier for IT to help maintain service level objectives because the admins will be able to quickly figure out where the issues are and why they are happening.

“We have worked with Microsoft for years – they’ve been a great customer, a technology supporter, and IT management partner,” the BlueStripe team writes on its homepage today. “Going forward, you will see BlueStripe’s technology play an even more important role as new data center and cloud solutions come to market. We are thrilled with the opportunity to be part of the next wave of IT innovation.”

For Microsoft, today’s acquisition is yet another in a series moves the company has lately executed to help enterprises run and manage their hybrid clouds. “As evidenced through our recent announcements such as Microsoft Azure Stack, OMS, Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, Microsoft is committed to providing leading hybrid cloud solutions and support for our customers,” Microsoft’s general manager for enterprise cloud Mike Neil writes today (though we hear that Azure Stack, which is meant to bring some Azure services into any data center, is still more promise than reality at this point).

“Today’s acquisition furthers that promise, giving IT even more hybrid cloud flexibility to focus on what matters most – rapidly delivering business value to drive innovation.”