Diamanti buys GroundWork and its K8S monitoring capability

Diamanti has bought GroundWork Open Source with its IT monitoring software product for physical, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructures.

With GroundWork’s technology, Diamanti – which sells a Kubernetes lifecycle management platform – says it can “vastly enhance the artificial intelligence-driven predictive analytics it can unlock with Kubernetes.” This should enable Kubernetes-using businesses to scale monitoring of data in real time with relatively minimal costs. Diamanti says it will move into AI, helping to transform businesses’ ability to process vast amounts of data in real time.

Chris Hickey.

Chris Hickey, Diamanti CEO, said: “Nobody else has the ability to perform the kind of monitoring GroundWork and Diamanti combined will be able to unleash with Kubernetes. Without the data, you can’t predict, and if you can’t predict, you’re not really doing AI at scale – so you’re missing all the positive business and consumer outcomes that vaunted term entails.”

GroundWork says it can monitor an entire IT environment and its GroundWork Monitor Enterprise product is IT monitoring software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructures. Diamanti says customers can collect and analyse all their performance and operational data with the single GroundWork platform.

It claims Kubernetes monitoring with GroundWork’s application performance monitoring software gives organisations visibility into application and business performance, including insights into containerised applications, Kubernetes clusters, Docker containers, and underlying infrastructure metrics. It enables real-time predictive analytics.

GroundWork product video.

Hickey said “Diamanti is building the most comprehensive technology stack for Kubernetes, spanning storage, security, networking, orchestration, and now K8S monitoring. With GroundWork at its side, Diamanti will save on expenses, gain valuable monitoring expertise, and offer much faster performance.”

Diamanti is building up its headcount and software capabilities quickly. Hickey is hustling things along like a man in a hurry.

GroundWork history

GroundWork Open Source was founded in 2003 in San Francisco by David Lilly, Robert Fanini and VP Product Strategy Thomas Stocking. Its progress since then has been eventful. Fanini was the CEO from 2003 until October 2007 and is now the co-founder and managing general partner at Inspiration Ventures. When he left Ranga Rangacharin took on the CEO role. David Lilly replaced him in 2008 but moved sideways to be COO when Peter Jackson was hired as the CEO in March 2009. 

The firm raised an unrevealed amount of money in a venture round that year, with cash from Canaan Partners, Mayfield Fund, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures. At the time customers included include The World Bank, the University of North Carolina, Genworth Financial, Siemens and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Total funding according to Crunchbase was $29 million which was raised across four rounds in 2004 ($3M), 2005 ($8.5M), 2007 ($12.5M) and 2009 ($5M).

Private equity business Parallax Capital bought GroundWork for an undisclosed amount in August 2015 and then Fox Technologies, a portfolio company of Parallax Capital, bought it in February 2016. At that point co-founder David Lilly was EVP of sales and operations at GroundWork.

Richard Campbell, a partner at Parallax Capital, is the current CEO, the fifth one in GroundWork’s history, while Michael Hale is the COO. According to LinkedIn, Hale is also the EVP of operations at Quark Software and SVP operations at Parallax Capital Partners – obviously a busy guy. It appears that neither David Lilly nor Robert Fanini are employed by GroundWork at this time.

It is unclear if the two Parallax execs, Campbell and Haley, will stay with GroundWork. We think it unlikely.

LinkedIn currently lists 14 GroundWork employees.