Splunk announces $1.05bn acquisition of cloud-monitoring service SignalFx

SignalFx acquisition upgrades Splunk’s operational analytics for the cloud-first and Kubernetes era

Splunk has announced it is to acquire cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05bn, which will be divided into 60 percent cash and 40 percent Splunk Common Stock.

SignalFx provides realtime monitoring of everything cloud, including infrastructure, microservices and apps. Splunk said the acquisition will position them as a “leader in observability and APM for organisations at every stage of their cloud journey, from cloud-native apps to homegrown on-premises application.”

“Data fuels the modern business, and the acquisition of SignalFx squarely puts Splunk in position as a leader in monitoring and observability at massive scale,” said Doug Merritt, president and CEO, Splunk in a press release.

“SignalFx will support our continued commitment to giving customers one platform that can monitor the entire enterprise application lifecycle. We are also incredibly impressed by the SignalFx team and leadership, whose expertise and professionalism are a strong addition to the Splunk family.”

Formed in 2003, Splunk is a big data analytics veteran that provides realtime data on enterprise operations to help firms identify weak spots and optimise performance.

With the acquisition of SignalFx, Splunk is seeking to cater to enterprise operations that are increasingly defined by cloud-native applications and modern infrastructures, including containers and orchestrated environments. According to Gartner, by 2022 more than 75 percent of global organsations will be running containerised applications in production.

“As the world continues to move towards complex, cloud-first architectures, Splunk and SignalFx is the new approach needed to monitor and observe cloud-native infrastructure and applications in real time, whether via logs, metrics or tracing. The SignalFx team is thrilled to join Splunk to help CIOs capitalize upon the modern application portfolio,” said Karthik Rau, Founder and CEO, SignalFx.

The companies said the acquisition is expected to close in the second half of fiscal 2020, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory reviews.