BMC Picks Up IT Masters for $42 Million

With the rush to snap up software that will manage other software
applications, BMC Software Tuesday purchased
privately-held IT Masters International
S.A. for about $42 million in cash.

Prior to the purchase, Houston’s BMC had already been a leader in enterprise
management software, but buying Belgian’s IT Masters will help it add
breadth to its family of software products, particularly on the service
level. IT Masters’ specialty is adaptive software that detects and manages
changes across a computer network.

With this technology, IT businesses can prioritize their work according to
the company’s needs, responding to problems in real-time by linking service
delivery and support with IT infrastructure and applications. Many major
software vendors, including Microsoft, IBM and HP, are embarking on similar
initiatives to deliver intuitive software that divines dilemmas coming down
the pike.

IT Masters’ flagship service management product is MasterCell, and BMC
anticipates it will be an important cog in its service management strategy,
providing the base platform for service impact management, real-time service
modeling, root-cause analysis and service level agreement management.
Specifically, BMC’s mainframe systems software MAINVIEW and batch scheduling
and output management product INCONTROL will be eventually integrated with
MasterCell to pull data from the enterprise.

BMC and IT Masters were partners prior to the acquisition: MasterCell is
already integrated with BMC’s PATROL software. The buy is BMC’s first since
it’s November 2002 purchase
of Remedy Software from Peregrine Systems, which was at one point BMC’s
toughest competitor before it fell on hard times.

IT Masters also makes and sells MasterAR Suite, a suite of productivity
tools that are integrated into the Remedy Action Request System, an
application platform and development environment.

IT Masters keeps software development offices in Belgium and Austin, Texas
and its 75 employees will join BMC.