Microsoft Acquires .NET Application Monitoring Startup AVIcode

Microsoft has just announced the acquisition of AVIcode, a Baltimore-based company that develops a realtime application monitoring software for the .NET Framework. According to a statement from the company, the acquisition will help provide Microsoft “customers with unified management for physical, virtualized and cloud applications, whether they are running in a customer, service provider or Microsoft datacenter.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

According to the blog post, AVIcode’s software will be available through the Microsoft’s System Center product family. AVIcode’s products include a variety of application monitoring services for the full application lifecycle.

AVIcode’s monitoring capabilities includes, a specialized Silverlight monitoring product, data on how an end user measures an application’s performance and quality, the ability to trace the performance of critical business transactions, and allows administrators to access detailed information regarding the hardware and software components of a distributed application or service.

Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s CVP, Management & Security Division, writes that “Bringing together the capabilities of Operations Manager with the enhancements from AVIcode enables organizations to truly get the 360-degree view of their service—independent of where the service is hosted, whether a datacenter/cloud, in a partner’s hosted data center/cloud, or from a public cloud solution such as Windows Azure.” AVIcode has raised over $2 million in venture funding.

It’s unclear if the AVIcode deal is part of Microsoft’s secret acquisition spree of 15 companies over the past year, including 3D virtual world Vivaty. In contrast to Google, Microsoft has been more tight-lipped about its acquisitions but perhaps this strategy is changing.