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Thoma Bravo Acquires Empirix

Thoma Bravo, LLC, a private equity investment firm, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Empirix Inc., a provider of end-to-end network testing, monitoring and analytics solutions.

Empirix helps service providers, mobile operators and enterprises master complexities within their networks and optimize business performance with real-time intelligence to reduce operational costs, maximize customer retention and grow top-line revenues.

The Empirix customer base consists of top communication service providers, mobile operators, banks, insurance and healthcare companies. The company has achieved significant growth over the past five years, reporting 22 percent year-over-year revenue growth in 2012, partially driven by a significant increase in bookings from global Tier 1 mobile operators.

“Empirix is a clear leader in the field of service assurance and network management,” said Robert Sayle, principal, Thoma Bravo.

“The company offers a unique ability to analyze customer behaviors by application in real time,” added Seth Boro, managing partner, Thoma Bravo. “Its products, strategy and leadership have positioned it for success, and we look forward to accelerating that success through organic growth and strategic acquisition opportunities.”

Thoma Bravo has deep experience in the service assurance and network management markets. Recent investments include Network Instruments, InfoVista, Blue Coat Systems, nCircle, SonicWALL, Mentum, Solera Networks, Netronome, and more recently Keynote Systems.

“Empirix has experienced significant growth in the past several years as companies strive to better manage and transform complex communications systems and the business objectives they support,” said John D’Anna, the company’s chief executive officer. “The resources of Thoma Bravo will strengthen our position to meet our customer’s glaring need for next-gen technology, while we rapidly complete our plan to bridge applications and network monitoring for both the enterprise and service provider markets.”

Financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to be finalized by early November.

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Thoma Bravo Acquires Empirix

Thoma Bravo, LLC, a private equity investment firm, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Empirix Inc., a provider of end-to-end network testing, monitoring and analytics solutions.

Empirix helps service providers, mobile operators and enterprises master complexities within their networks and optimize business performance with real-time intelligence to reduce operational costs, maximize customer retention and grow top-line revenues.

The Empirix customer base consists of top communication service providers, mobile operators, banks, insurance and healthcare companies. The company has achieved significant growth over the past five years, reporting 22 percent year-over-year revenue growth in 2012, partially driven by a significant increase in bookings from global Tier 1 mobile operators.

“Empirix is a clear leader in the field of service assurance and network management,” said Robert Sayle, principal, Thoma Bravo.

“The company offers a unique ability to analyze customer behaviors by application in real time,” added Seth Boro, managing partner, Thoma Bravo. “Its products, strategy and leadership have positioned it for success, and we look forward to accelerating that success through organic growth and strategic acquisition opportunities.”

Thoma Bravo has deep experience in the service assurance and network management markets. Recent investments include Network Instruments, InfoVista, Blue Coat Systems, nCircle, SonicWALL, Mentum, Solera Networks, Netronome, and more recently Keynote Systems.

“Empirix has experienced significant growth in the past several years as companies strive to better manage and transform complex communications systems and the business objectives they support,” said John D’Anna, the company’s chief executive officer. “The resources of Thoma Bravo will strengthen our position to meet our customer’s glaring need for next-gen technology, while we rapidly complete our plan to bridge applications and network monitoring for both the enterprise and service provider markets.”

Financial terms were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to be finalized by early November.

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Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...