Last month, EMC acquired Infra, an Australian provider of IT service management software. Infra is not a newcomer to ITSM. The company was established in 1991 and offers a Web-based software suite encompassing problem and incident management; request, change, and release management; and capacity, service continuity, and knowledge management built around its own configuration management database, or CMDB.

Infra represents the fourth in a series of acquisitions that build upon EMC’s core architectural capabilities foundational to service management. The series began with the acquisition of SMARTS for network discovery, advanced analytics and network management in 2005, followed by nLayers for application dependency mapping in 2006, Voyence for network change and configuration management last year, and now Infra. EMC is clearly taking a building-block approach to rounding out its infrastructure management technologies.

Why Infra and why ITSM? EMC will use Infra technology to further solidify EMC’s “Closed Loop Service Orchestration” strategy. This strategy takes the foundational components and insight into IT infrastructure, builds upon that with the auto-discovery capabilities, and will now add the top-line service management capabilities available in the Infra product suite.

EMC has leadership in many areas, yet the company has not played a significant role in the ITSM market. Infra takes EMC to the “front office,” so to speak, of the ITSM landscape. Prior investments made by EMC involved infrastructure including service models, configuration and change management, and even application discovery and modeling with its nLayers acquisition with a heavy infrastructure focus. All of these investments set the stage for EMC to begin to play in the service management market. Infra is EMC’s first step into the customer-facing, service delivery limelight.

At the time of EMC’s nLayers acquisition, Enterprise Management Associates stated that the key ramification of the nLayers acquisition was “to enable cross-domain service assurance with a holistic view of the application ecosystem.” In addition, nLayers could provide “flow” based information that complements SNMP statistics and polling, and the ability to add application-aware chargebacks - and it gave EMC a seat at the CMDB table.