Riverbed Technology announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Aternity.

The acquisition of the privately-held company will expand Riverbed’s SteelCentral performance monitoring solutions with a best-in-class end user experience offering, and provide Riverbed customers and partners with the industry’s best and most comprehensive end-to-end visibility solution– spanning network, application and end user experience performance management.

“Aternity is another exciting and strategic acquisition for Riverbed. Their innovative end user experience monitoring offering perfectly complements and extends our SteelCentral solutions,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed Chairman and CEO. “With the increased use of mobile devices, virtual desktop environments and the cloud, the ability to manage end user experience has become more important and complex for IT organizations. With this acquisition, Riverbed and our partners are now uniquely positioned to provide CIOs and businesses with a complete view across networks, applications and end users, all in one solution.”

Aternity’s proven technology helps enterprises see the entire user experience for any application running on any device, providing a user-centric, application performance experience vantage point that many of the market’s narrow-scope network or application performance monitoring tools lack. By effectively transforming every device – physical, virtual and mobile – into a self-monitoring platform that is user experience aware, enterprises are empowered with user-centric, proactive IT management capabilities that dramatically reduce business disruptions and increase workforce productivity.

This level of insight is increasingly important as enterprises rely on a mix of public and private clouds to gain operational agility, speed up application deployment, and achieve cost savings. The result is a hybrid IT environment in which applications and data are spread across heterogeneous operating systems, multiple data centers and cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.

“Enterprises are accelerating their adoption of Hybrid IT environments to improve agility and control infrastructure costs,” said Mike Sargent, SVP and GM of the Riverbed SteelCentral Business Unit. “By capturing and analyzing how applications and devices perform from the end user’s perspective, Aternity offers enterprises the ability to proactively manage these increasingly complex IT environments to drive greater workforce productivity – and this critical capability combined with the power of SteelCentral will arm them with the most powerful and complete performance monitoring solution in the industry.”

An early pioneer in end user experience monitoring, Aternity today monitors more than 1.7 million mobile, virtual and desktop workforce endpoints. Device-based monitoring is important for ‘true’ end-user experience, especially as applications continue to fragment where/how they run and as users fragment where/how they access applications. Riverbed’s acquisition of Aternity will deliver to customers industry-leading end user experience and device-based monitoring and visibility across all mobile, virtual and desktop devices, and into all applications including cloud/SaaS applications. Riverbed plans to offer Aternity solutions through its robust partner ecosystem.

Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research Vice President, Enterprise Systems Management Software, said, “The acquisition of Aternity is a great fit for Riverbed. By adding end user experience, end user device and workplace productivity monitoring to Riverbed’s existing network and browser based SteelCentral APM toolkit, Riverbed will be much better positioned to help customers deploy and manage applications and infrastructure to support today’s highly mobile, digital, online business strategies.”

The news continues Riverbed’s SteelCentral momentum, which recently included significant enhancements in cloud-based performance monitoring, along with new capabilities to help accelerate business execution and boost productivity.

The acquisition also follows Riverbed’s acquisition of leading SD-WAN provider Ocedo in January 2016, which enabled Riverbed to get to market faster with application-defined SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solution SteelConnect in April. Additionally, Riverbed offers a comprehensive Application Performance Platform that delivers end-to-end visibility, optimization and control.

The acquisition of Aternity is expected to close in August 2016. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.