To combat increasing competition from cloud-based monitoring providers, Virtual Instruments Inc. and Load DynamiX Inc. have signed a merger agreement will see their assets combined under the former’s name. The new outfit is poised to hit the ground running thanks to $20 million in funding courtesy of growth-stage fund HighBar Partners and three other institutional investors.

One of the first areas where the capital will be put to use is tightening the integration between Virtual Instruments’ performance management software and the Load DynamiX monitoring suite, which offers analytics functionality for storage administrators. The combination will  provide the ability centrally keep track of an organization’s entire infrastructure, according to merger announcement, including most of everything from on-premise hardware to virtual machines running in the cloud.

The immediate beneficiaries of the integration will be the vendors’ several hundred existing customers, which have apparently been asking for the functionality rather insistently in run-up to the news. The combined company will also work to widen the appeal of its value proposition to other organizations as part of an expanded customer acquisition effort facilitated by the new funding. The push is set to be led by Load DynamiX CEO Philippe Vincent, who is taking over the reins from John Thompson, his former counterpart at Virtual Instruments. The rest of the management team will consist of senior executives handpicked from both sides.

The merger announcement states that the board is also being reshuffled on occasion of the move with the addition of two representatives from HighBar Partners, John Kim and Roy Thiele-Sardina. But the rank and file is staying intact, which is good news for any employees who might have feared they’re being made redundant.

Image via Geralt