EMC continues to expand its IT services tool set with the acquisition of Infra, a privately held IT service management provider.

Financial terms were not disclosed. EMC said the new technology broadens its capacity to provide technology that helps customers manage IT services -- and to compete with leaders in the space like HP, IBM, CA, BMC and a slew of others.

"This tool will help automate the discovery of IT problems and also automate change management processes and that will help IT better deliver services," Bob Quillin, EMC's senior director of product marketing, told InternetNews.com.

The news continues EMC's aggressive efforts to develop its IT management portfolio. In October, EMC bought privately-held Voyence, a provider of network configuration and change management solutions that automate critical change, compliance and activation processes.

A year earlier, the storage titan gobbled up nLayers, a developer of software to discover and map applications across multiple servers.

EMC execs said the company's newest addition, 17-year-old Infra, "solidifies" what the storage giant calls its "Closed Loop Service Orchestration" strategy -- aimed at enabling IT staffs to more easily manage datacenter operations.

Infra's core offering, infraEnterprise, is a Web-based IT infrastructure library that provides a central location for managing IT services. The tool includes Service Desk with Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Release, Service Level and Availability Management processes.

With Infra and its other recent purchases, EMC is angling for a piece of the pie currently being fought over by other large enterprise vendors. HP, for instance, in November debuted an integrated suite for automating IT operations. IBM, BMC and CA also continue pressing hard into the space, while other new entrants continue to emerge.

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EMC also is seeking to grow via acquisition in its core storage business -- a strategy that may have hit a snag following its spurned overture to buy up Iomega this week.

Iomega dismissed EMC offer of $3.25 a share as inadequate but EMC had indicated there could be future negotiation talks.