Latest VMware Acquisition to Strengthen Modern App Security

VMware is buying Mesh7. The virtualization giant’s latest acquisition secures cloud-native applications and microservices by monitoring application behavior at the API layer.

The acquisition is part of VMware‘s efforts to make modern applications more secure. Once the deal closes, the Mesh7 technology will enable VMware to bring visibility, discovery and better security to APIs.

Mesh7 API Security Mesh provides application and API layer visibility to remove any blind spots within distributed and cloud-native application environments. It does so in a frictionless manner while being agnostic to the platform, cloud, environment and workload type.

VMware isn’t disclosing financial details of the transaction.

More Value for VMware Partners

Tom Gillis is senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s networking and security business unit.

VMware’s Tom Gillis

“The value partners bring to customers is in helping them drive their app and cloud transformations,” he said. “This means having access to a modern set of capabilities for connecting and protecting modern apps that span multicloud environments.”

VMware is building a set of modern application connectivity services, Gillis said. That allows partners to bring more value to customers.

In time, partners will be able to offer the combination of Tanzu Service Mesh and Mesh7 to give developers and security teams a better understanding of when, where and how APIs are communicating. That’s even across multicloud environments, enabling better DevSecOps.

“VMware is continually working to help partners capture the customer opportunity for multicloud and app modernization,” Gillis said. “This is guided by the belief that a better developer experience leads to more secure operations. After close, the tight integration of Mesh7’s contextual API behavior security solution with Tanzu Service Mesh will deliver high-fidelity understanding of which applications components are talking to which APIs.”

In time, VMware plans to roll out an overall API solution, he said. It will make the developer experience for APIs more secure by default and easy to operate.

Upon close of the acquisition, the Mesh7 team will join VMware and help deliver the overall API solution, Gillis said.