IBM Alights on Candle in Management Buy

IBM agreed to acquire infrastructure management concern Candle Corporation in the latest in a series of acquisitions to speed its middleware capabilities for running on-demand systems.


Big Blue will purchase privately-held Candle, based in El Segundo, Calif., for an undisclosed sum.


Candle makes software that helps customers build out and manage their
enterprise infrastructure in data centers, according to Candle President Andy Mullins.


Mullins told internetnews.com Candle’s core focus is on automating management in enterprise data centers in anything from transactional platforms such as CICS on IBM’s zSeries mainframe systems in Linux, Unix and Windows operating environments.


Mullins said Candle also offers software to manage application servers and helps create and deploy management applications and infrastructure in J2EE environments. The company’s products do this in real-time, accompanied by business reporting analytics and service levels, which are integrated back into infrastructure management capabilities.


An IBM business partner since its founding in 1976, Candle’s software has been applied in the majority of IBM’s software brands, including DB2, Tivoli, WebSphere and Lotus. While the company’s assets have been applied to a range of IBM products, it is perhaps most closely aligned with the company’s Tivoli management software.


Robert LeBlanc, general manager of IBM Tivoli and charged with overseeing the integration of Candle, expects the Candle assets will help customers improve their ability to managing an on demand operating environment, where software is automated and maintained on the fly.


In e-business on-demand environments, customers continually need
infrastructure support changes and the ability to have that infrastructure adapt to changes in various business processes, LeBlanc told internetnews.com.


Candle “gives us the capabilities to accelerate end-to-end management of customers’ environment and adapt the change in business velocity with a new level of flexibility,” LeBlanc said.


The acquisition of Candle, which boasts more than 3,000 global customers, is expected to close in the second quarter of 2004.


Should it succeed, the purchase would be Big Blue’s 15th software buy in the last three years, all of which have been tailored to dovetail or enhance the company’s core on-demand initiative.


Most recently, IBM moved to acquire infrastructure middleware outfit Trigo. Last December, IBM grabbed enterprise content management concern Green
Pastures
.


IBM’s steady acquisition pace to improve its on-demand play is perhaps rivaled only by HP, which has been steadily filling holes in its Adaptive Enterprise strategy over the last year, with purchases such as Consera Software, Novadigm and TruLogica.

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