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.
“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.

GoCo Group technology director Kieron Nolan explains the firm’s plans to migrate most of its price comparison platforms to the Microsoft Azure cloud in 2020

The price comparison website market is a crowded place, dominated by a handful of major players that are pushing for consumers to use their online platforms over their competitors’ to find the best deals in an increasingly wide and diverse array of financial products and utilities.

GoCo Group, which owns the GoCompare price comparison site, is among them, and has spent much of the past decade pursuing a buy-and-build strategy to expand its business and product range, as well as offer consumers new ways to save money.

Above and beyond its flagship GoCompare service, the group now boasts the utilities-focused comparison site Energylinx, consumer discounts site MyVoucherCodes and its energy tariff-switching offering, WeFlip.

These brands are collectively designed to help consumers save money, either through finding them better deals on their car insurance, credit cards, loans, and energy tariffs, or making it easier for them to track down retailer discounts, as part of what GoCo calls its savings-as-a-service proposition.

The “as-a-service” phrasing is synonymous with using cloud, but for GoCo, the move off-premise is one it is still negotiating as it works towards shifting most of the IT infrastructure underpinning its brands to the Microsoft Azure cloud in 2020.

A substantial part of the groundwork for this move has already been done, according to group director technology Kieron Nolan, as GoCo has already completed six months of work this year moving its disaster recovery systems to Azure.

A couple of “less critical” services were also moved across during this period, Nolan tells Computer Weekly, which means the firm will operate a hybrid cloud setup until the next phase of the migration gets under way in 2020.

“Although the entire platform isn’t live [in Azure] yet, what we have seen is that the performance of that platform has improved, and the customer experience has too, and the time it takes to switch over to our disaster recovery platform is greatly reduced to sub-10 minutes now, which is a significant improvement,” he says.

“That’s all been working brilliantly, so we have every confidence that we’re on the right track for switching over completely next year.”

Given how well the initial phase of the project has gone, some enterprises might be inclined to seize on these benefits to justify ramping up the pace of their cloud migration plans, but Nolan says GoCo is committed to delivering the project in a calm, measured and methodical way.

“The web platforms are the business, and are key to what we do on a day-to-day basis,” he says, so the firm can ill afford to do anything without thoroughly planning and testing it all out first.

“We have to be really sure we are approaching it in the right way, and from there we are testing everything along the way,” he adds. “And it is only when we are at the point where we are certain that we are in a good place that we switch across.”

The initial phase of the migration saw GoCo’s 130-strong technology team working alongside representatives from managed cloud provider Rackspace’s professional services team, who were on hand to offer advice and support from an architectural and delivery point of view.

This collaboration will continue in the next phase of the project, says Nolan, because of the experience and insight Rackspace has already imparted to the GoCo Group tech team.

“Generally speaking, we don’t outsource technology, but what was really important to us on this project was having access to a partner like Rackspace that has done this kind of work before,” he says.

“They gave us insights into how to tackle challenges and make the most of opportunities other companies have had [which have done similar projects with them], so we didn’t have to learn all those lessons ourselves.”

Drawing on past experience

Rackspace is also well versed in how GoCo Group’s IT systems are set up and organised, given that it has been responsible for hosting GoCo’s infrastructure in its own datacentres for 12 years now.

Nolan says: “GoCo started out in 2006 and we started the engagement with Rackspace in and around 2007, as we got to the point as a startup where you are a serious brand with some real customers, and having the infrastructure [running the company] sat in the office was no longer the right thing.

“So we migrated initially from our office environment to their datacentres, and that is where the relationship all started.”

As the number of brands GoCo operates has grown, so too has its reliance on Rackspace’s infrastructure hosting capabilities, says Nolan.

“As we’ve acquired those businesses, we brought them into line with the group platforms and moved them over to Rackspace managed environments,” he adds.

It is a setup that has served the group well, but there are scalability benefits that moving to a cloud-based setup will bring that have made it essential to switch up its hosting arrangements, says Nolan.

For example, its flagship brand, GoCompare, garners about five million website visits a month on it own, and is prone to unpredictable spikes in traffic at a moment’s notice.

“There are peaks and troughs in traffic to the site, and there are a number of things that can drive that, from TV and media advertising, through to GoCompare being a recommended comparison site that people should use by experts on TV,” says Nolan. “We wanted to be in a better position to manage those peaks and troughs.”

Beyond elastic infrastructure 

It is not just access to Azure’s elastic, cloud-based compute capabilities that GoCo is looking to tap into. Its platforms are crunching through, and trying to make sense of, billions of data points generated by the activities of its customers, who are all in pursuit of better deals on utilities and financial services products.

While the company has traditionally focused on comparison services, the roll-out of its WeFlip service in October 2018 saw it take steps to make it easier for its customers to switch energy tariffs as often as they need, to ensure they are getting the best possible deal.

The service is automated and data-driven, says Nolan, and GoCo has already started tapping into some of Azure’s big data processing, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support WeFlip’s operations.

In particular, it has been leaning on Azure Databricks, Microsoft’s Apache Spark-based big data analytics service, which users can build on to create their own AI offerings.

“When we started to look at AI platforms, it was obvious and made sense to go down the Databricks route,” says Nolan, especially as the move to Azure overall seems to have been something of a no-brainer for the firm.

Through its technology tie-up with Rackspace, GoCo could have accessed similar managed cloud offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud, but it opted for Microsoft Azure for a mix of legacy, efficiency and ease of migration reasons, says Nolan.

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“GoCompare traditionally was a Microsoft stack, and what we were clear on when we [talked about] migrating to cloud was that we didn’t want to have to re-engineer the entire platform,” he says.

“If we did, that initial six-month project would turn into years, and we didn’t want to risk the kind of timeline that came with that. And so we made a decision that the Microsoft fit was there and made it a lot simpler, architecturally, to migrate.”

As previously mentioned, the company has made a concerted effort in the past to bring all the brands it has acquired onto the same underlying platforms and stacks for consistency purposes.

One notable exception is the MyVoucherCodes platform, which is underpinned by a PHP stack running in the AWS cloud, but managed, once again, by Rackspace.

Apart from that, the firm now has a carefully plotted course ahead of it that will see it evolve the hybrid infrastructure underpinning most of its platforms for an all-in Azure setup.

But far from marking the end of its digital transformation efforts, the completion of its Microsoft cloud migration looks set to usher in a fresh wave of innovation at the firm, says Nolan.

“With the platform in Azure, over time – and where it makes sense – we will re-engineer parts of the platform,” he says. “There is a drive across the industry with open banking, for example, and we want some of our brands to take advantage of that.

“By having the platforms in Azure, it makes it much simpler for us to develop and integrate with third parties like banks and other financial services entities, which is a good example of the type of foundation this work will put in place for us.”

VMware Acquires Bitfusion to Virtualize Hardware Accelerators

In a move that attracted less attention than it deserved at the time, VMware acquired Bitfusion, a startup specializing in virtualization software for accelerated computing. Bitfusion’s core technology improves virtual machine performance by offloading processing to hardware accelerator chips — including GPUs, FPGAs, and custom ASICs — and making those resources available as a shared, network-accessible pool rather than as isolated, per-server hardware.

What Bitfusion Actually Does

Traditionally, GPU-based workloads are tightly coupled to the physical server on which the GPU resides. This bare-metal deployment model creates several practical problems for enterprise infrastructure teams:

• Poor GPU utilization: A GPU assigned to one workload sits idle when that workload is not actively using it.
• Resource silos: Organizations cannot easily share accelerator capacity across teams or applications.
• Limited scalability: Scaling a workload typically means provisioning additional dedicated hardware rather than drawing from a shared pool.

Bitfusion addresses these problems by decoupling GPU and accelerator resources from individual servers. Workloads across the network can draw from a common pool of GPU capacity. When a job requires more compute power, multiple GPUs can be brought to bear simultaneously, regardless of which physical host they reside on.

Integration into vSphere

VMware planned to integrate Bitfusion technology directly into vSphere following the close of the acquisition. Krish Prasad, then Senior Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit, framed the deal explicitly in terms of VMware’s AI and ML infrastructure strategy:

“In many ways, Bitfusion offers for hardware acceleration what VMware offered to the compute landscape several years ago. Bitfusion also aligns well with VMware’s ‘Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device’ vision with its ability to work across AI frameworks, clouds, networks, and formats such as virtual machines and containers.”

Krish Prasad, SVP & GM, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware

Prasad also noted that the platform was designed to be extensible beyond GPUs, with the ability to support FPGAs and other custom ASICs as the accelerator ecosystem continues to mature.

Why GPU Virtualization Matters for AI and ML Workloads

AI and machine learning workloads are among the most compute-intensive tasks enterprises run today, and GPUs have become the de facto hardware for training and inference. However, the economics of GPU deployment at scale are challenging:

• High-end GPUs are expensive to purchase and operate.
• Individual AI training jobs may not fully saturate a GPU’s compute capacity.
• Multi-tenant environments struggle to share GPU resources safely and efficiently.

By treating GPUs as pooled, virtualized infrastructure — analogous to how vSphere already treats CPU and memory — Bitfusion’s approach enables higher utilization, better cost efficiency, and more flexible resource allocation across workloads and teams.

This parallels VMware’s earlier expansions into storage virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN), both of which extended vSphere’s value proposition well beyond basic server virtualization. Adding hardware accelerator virtualization to that stack represents a similar architectural shift for GPU-heavy workloads.

Competitive Implications

At the time of the acquisition, neither Microsoft Hyper-V nor KVM offered comparable native GPU pooling and virtualization capabilities at the platform level. By embedding Bitfusion into vSphere, VMware positioned itself ahead of competing hypervisor platforms for organizations looking to run AI and ML workloads in virtualized environments on-premises or in hybrid cloud configurations.

VMware Also Acquires Uhana

Bitfusion was not VMware’s only acquisition announced around this period. The company also acquired Uhana, an AI engine built specifically for telecommunications carriers and network operators. Uhana’s platform is designed to:

• Detect anomalies in network or application behavior in real time.
• Prioritize those anomalies based on their potential operational impact.
• Automatically recommend optimization strategies to network operations teams.

Together, the Bitfusion and Uhana acquisitions reflected VMware’s broader push to embed AI and ML capabilities across its infrastructure portfolio — both at the hardware acceleration layer (Bitfusion) and at the network intelligence layer (Uhana).

Summary

The Bitfusion acquisition gave VMware a concrete technical answer to one of the most pressing infrastructure challenges in AI and ML deployments: how to share, pool, and efficiently utilize expensive GPU hardware across a virtualized environment. By integrating Bitfusion into vSphere, VMware extended its hypervisor platform into accelerated computing territory — a move with lasting significance as GPU-based workloads continue to grow in enterprise data centers.