The announcement reads almost like the next logical chapter in a story BigPanda has been writing for years. The company has always positioned itself around the idea that IT Operations doesn’t need to be this endless loop of alerts, escalations, and late-night firefighting. By acquiring Velocity, a company deeply rooted in SRE practice and major incident response, BigPanda is trying to push that idea from concept to full-scale execution. Velocity comes with teams that have lived inside the pressure of real outages, where decisions have to be both immediate and correct, and where every minute of MTTR has a price tag. That practical muscle is valuable, and you can feel why BigPanda saw it not just as an addition, but as acceleration.
The shared premise here is that agentic AI is ready to transform one of the most stubbornly manual parts of enterprise operations. Global IT organizations spend hundreds of billions each year on human-driven detection, diagnosis, and resolution work. People still scan dashboards, route incidents by hand, and chase signals across systems that don’t quite talk to each other. BigPanda’s platform already automates a large chunk of this at the L1 level, reducing the amount of noise that reaches human teams. Velocity’s expertise strengthens the next layer up: how incident response workflows adapt in real time, how teams maintain reliability under scale, and how to let AI reason across complex environments instead of acting like a simple rules engine.
One of the more interesting details is the leadership move. Tal Kain, Velocity’s founder and CEO, is stepping in as BigPanda’s VP of AI Detection and Response. He has a history of building automation-driven systems in tough enterprise settings, and before that, he came out of Unit 8200, where resilience and fast problem-solving are simply baseline expectations. His framing is refreshingly blunt: engineers should solve meaningful problems, not chase alerts. That’s the core thread tying this acquisition together. It’s not about replacing people—it’s about removing the repetitive work that forces skilled teams to operate at half capacity.
Assaf Resnick, BigPanda’s CEO, described this moment as a way to deliver reasoning-based automation at enterprise scale. The customer sentiment behind that is clear. Organizations don’t just want fewer incidents; they want operations that prevent issues before customers feel them, and they want systems that can explain why they acted the way they did. That “why” is where agentic AI matters. It moves automation from reactive scripts to something closer to genuine operational decision-making.
None of this reinvents BigPanda’s direction. It tightens it. The acquisition reinforces the company’s vision that digital operations can be proactive, resilient, and far less human-intensive. Velocity brings talent, tools, and a mindset aligned almost perfectly with that outcome. It’s less about expansion into something new and more about deepening a position BigPanda already committed to: automating the workflows that once depended on humans being awake, available, and constantly in reaction mode.
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