BMC Acquires Tideway Systems

BMC Software on Monday acquired Tideway Systems Ltd., a privately held developer of IT discovery software that makes it easier for IT managers to find and map all the disparate applications, network devices and servers housed in their datacenters.

Company officials did not disclose the financial terms of the deal but it’s expected close by week’s end.

The acquired application suite will complement BMC’s business service management platform (BSM) and help it better compete with rivals such as IBM, HP, EMC and Symantec which have made their own share of acquisitions in this space in recent years.

As enterprise customers continue to embrace virtualization applications to help consolidate their datacenters and reduce operational costs, they need applications like the ones developed by Tideway to track and identify all the moving pieces throughout the consolidation process.

“It’s really all about enhancing our customer value around their business services management agenda,” John Peters, general manager of BMC’s Atrium discovery and dependency mapping group, told InternetNews.com. “This gives our customers the capability to really see and understand what they have. It sounds simple, but it’s not.

“Tideway’s solutions lets them characterize their environment and view the full landscape of their IT estate,” he added. “As more and more customers are consolidating their datacenters and looking into cloud-based applications, it’s increasingly important to understand how these applications relate to business services and what components are needed to support them.”

Peters said BMC has partnered with Tideway for several years and shared many neutral customers that were using Tideway for discovery and BMC’s Atrium suite for database configuration management (CMDB). Tideway’s latest offering is a third-generation application and includes what Peters described as the “broadest library of predefined configurations” in the market.

“The Tideway platform has matured,” he said. “The timing is fantastic for us because we see increasing customer demand for more automated tools that give customers an out-of-the-box solution and the flexibility to create new discovery platforms.”

BMC officials said the addition of Tideway’s technology will give customers greater visibility into their datacenters to help reduce the time and costs associated with modeling, managing and maintaining applications and services, particularly as more and more enterprise customers opt for cloud-based services.

“[BMC’s] CMDB is most powerful when it has a clear understanding of infrastructure components, application dependencies and service relationships,” Gartner‘s Ronni Colville said in a statement. “This information can empower IT organizations to make more timely and accurate change and configuration decisions and deliver better service to the business.”

BMC (NYSE: BMC) shares moved up $0.43, or 1 percent, to $38.61 a share in early-afternoon trading following the announcement.