Wikipedia
Nicira
Nicira was a company focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization. It was founded in 2007 by Martin Casado, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker. Nicira created their own proprietary versions of the OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, and OpenStack networking projects.
On July 23, 2012, VMware announced they intended to acquire Nicira for $1.26 billion, a deal which closed the following month.