Sun Eyes SevenSpace for Outsourcing

Sun Microsystems has inked a deal to acquire
management service provider SevenSpace, the company said Monday.

A privately held firm based in Ashburn, Va., with more than 100
employees, SevenSpace (formerly SevenSpace/Nuclio) offers outsourced
information technology management services for upwards of 100 corporate
clients in industries such as financial services, government,
manufacturing and retail.

The company said its proprietary SpyGlass
Portal product dovetails with its application and infrastructure
management and design, network and systems management, and Web-based
software application monitoring services.

Sun said the acquisition should broaden its Managed Services
offerings to include heterogeneous environments, adding support for HP’s
legacy HP-UX and IBM’s AIX systems ,
along with Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux
.

“It is growing more evident by the day that ‘one size fits all’
outsourcing is history, replaced by managed services that improve
service levels at reduced costs while allowing customers to maintain
control of their competitive advantage,” Marissa Peterson, executive
vice president at Sun Services, said in a statement.

Sun said it would pay cash for the acquisition, and that the deal
should finalize before the end of March 2005. A Sun spokesperson said
that SevenSpace’s offices would remain open for at least a year while
Sun assesses the acquisition. Additional financial terms were not
disclosed.

Scott Woods, vice president of customer network services at Sun, told
internetnews.com the acquisition will eventually replace Sun
Remote Services (currently in version 2.x) because of limitations.

“It currently only runs on Sun platforms and can only monitor without
management capabilities,” Woods said. “SevenSpace will also help Sun in
the broader terms of network services. They are primarily a U.S.
company, but they monitor and manage assets in the United Kingdom and Singapore.
In the next 12 months, we plan to expand that capability on a global
scale.”

SevenSpace’s SpyGlass technology manages enterprise applications.
The company said it still lets customers maintain ownership of
their people and heterogeneous IT assets. Unlike other outsourcing
platforms that are largely people and equipment intensive, SevenSpace
claims to have a low equipment and people footprint.

After it merged
with Nuclio in 2002, SevenSpace became the largest
enterprise management service provider, with enterprise customers, such as
pharmacy giant CVS, Xerox and GATX. The company also has
relationships with Exodus, EMC, XO, HP, KPMG
Consulting and Forsythe Technology.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun has been evangelizing its N1 systems to
CIOs around the globe throughout the past year, urging companies to focus first
on mainframe migration and enterprise consolidation.

Earlier this month, Sun released the third version of its Enterprise
Storage manager, the company’s storage operating system based on
the Storage Management Interoperability Specification (SMI-S). The
platform allows customers to manage heterogeneous devices, which is
something other vendors have been taking up in the past year.