VMware announces at VMworld 2010 San Francisco that it plans to acquire management software maker Integrien, with company leaders declaring VMware's intentions to became an IT automation provider.
Mergers and acquisitions happen often in the high-tech industry, but some stand out more than others either for their huge price tag, their strategic nature or the “game-changing” implications of the deal. VMware’s announcement Tuesday that it entered into an agreement to acquire management software maker Integrien proves the hypervisor vendor wants to make more money with customers by selling them management and automation technology.
Integrien Alive addresses virtual performance
At the opening keynote during VMworld 2010 San Francisco, Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer and senior vice president of R&D at VMware, revealed the hypervisor vendor had entered into agreements to acquire Integrien and separately security vendor TriCipher. Both planned acquisitions seem to address the need to provide management and automation, as well as security for the hybrid cloud environments VMware says it wants to enable.
“We need to innovate in this layer primarily around automation and management. We need to make it cheaper to operate this new infrastructure and automation has to span all of the resources in the data center,” Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, said during the keynote Tuesday, reinforcing the upcoming news. Maritz went on to explain that VMware is talking about delivering “data center management and data center automation.”
Also at VMworld 2010, the results of a survey conducted by Reflex Systems of 300 enterprise IT managers revealed that many respondents, in addition to hypervisors, said they also plan to invest in virtual storage and virtual management tools in the next six months. Among the reasons cited for investing in additional management tools (above and beyond those provided by the hypervisor vendors) were performance, security and auditing/reporting, Reflex Systems reports.
Integrien’s Alive software discovers the path an application takes across the infrastructure to deliver IT services and baselines normal behavior. When behavior strays from what is considered normal, the software alerts IT managers to the anomalies that could be the root cause of performance issues. The company showcased its product at DEMO ’07 and updated it in 2008 to extend its systems management capabilities to support VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Citrix XenServer, IBM AIX/IBM System P and Sun Solaris Containers.
According to a VMware press release, “Integrien’s patented real-time performance analytics solution helps customers simplify the complexity of managing application and infrastructure performance by transforming data from existing management tools into actionable intelligence. Combined with VMware vCenter management products, Integrien’s capabilities enable VMware customers to achieve the level of automation and control required for virtualized and cloud infrastructures.”
The pending acquisition of heterogeneous virtual systems management software makes industry watchers wonder two things: what will happen to VMware’s partnerships with IT management and automation market leaders such as BMC, CA Technologies, HP and other third-party management vendors?; and will VMware be able to provide the level of heterogeneous management capabilities across multiple platforms that non-hypervisor providing, third-party management vendors can offer customers for their virtual environments? The answer to the latter question can be simply put as “not yet.” But that doesn’t mean VMware doesn’t have more than enough opportunity to sell additional IT automation and management products into existing accounts.
And with such deals pending, it remains to be seen how it will impact partnerships, but VMware is not alone in realizing it must improve its IT automation and heterogeneous management capabilities to continue to capitalize on virtualization and help their customers extend into private, public and hybrid cloud environments. Virtualization competitor Microsoft has made aggressive moves to provide automation and management software as well, for instance, by acquiring Opalis.
What is your take on VMware’s management software acquisition news? Would you prefer to get your IT automation and management products from your hypervisor provider? Or with mixed environments, are third-party, platform-agnostic tools a safer bet? Please leave a comment here or e-mail your thoughts to me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.
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