Novell Tuesday announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire business service management vendor Managed Objects. The financial details of the deal remain undisclosed and it is expected to close early next year.
The pending acquisition represents another example of consolidation across the IT management software market in which bigger industry players intend to buy their way into competing against the big four: BMC, CA, HP and IBM. While Novell has asset, identity and workload management technology in its portfolio, the vendor doesn't rival the established players' efforts around IT service management. BMC is noted as a leader in BSM technology among the big four, but Managed Objects has been selling a similar scenario to customers for as many years: Don't manage IT as a series of components from various domains, but rather manage the IT application or service the components work together to deliver.
According to a press release, Novell intends to put Managed Objects' configuration management database technology to work discovering and detailing data center workloads. By coupling Managed Objects vendor-agnostic approach to aggregating management data from multiple platforms and systems with Novell's workload management and virtualization technologies, Novell executives said the company can help customers understand IT services in the context of the business.
"By adding the Managed Objects toolset to the Novell portfolio of data center solutions, we are unique in providing technology-agnostic and proven cross-platform solutions that span both the physical and virtual worlds -- all in one unified view," said Joe Wagner, senior vice president of systems and resource management at Novell, in a press release.
Novell, like countless other vendors, seem to be working toward providing the management console for mixed-platform physical and virtual resources across data centers. The goal is lofty and Novell is entering the market a bit later than vendors that have been working at providing this nirvana of sorts for enterprise IT customers for years. Companies like BMC, CA, HP and IBM naturally strive to provide the window into data center resources for customers, but challenges such as EMC, Microsoft and Oracle are also expected to ramp up efforts to win trust and become an anchor vendor in customer IT shops.
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Who saw this coming?
This is an interesting buy. We've been hearing so many differing things about Managed Objects over the past couple of years. They're not doing well but at the same time they're somehow doubling revenue, they make their money not from the CMDB but from the dashboards/visualization they provide (all of these comments by their VC investors by the way). But Novell? Who saw this coming? Wasn't it supposed to be EMC? So is this a nice validation of the heterogeneous management scenario (which we started out with 5 years ago and virtualization is just the latest albeit big driver for) or is this just more noise in the marketplace that makes it harder for customers to cut through the tool clutter?
Money well spent by Novell?
Of primary interest no doubt to Novell is the myCMDB product and the visualization (dashboards) tools that Managed Objects has. There are a lot synergies from a technical perspective. Novell has managed to survive building a business around SUSE and other open source solutions. Managed Objects itself is virtually built with open source tools and solutions, and of course it's Java based. So it's a good fit into Novell's portfolio technically, but also Novell has nothing like a CMDB which is the foundation stone for any ITIL project.
mycmdb?
Mosh - pointing you to an interesting thread about myCMDB and the very differing opinions on that one as well
http://www.itskeptic.org/node/644
myCMDB
Indeed there are one or two tough myCMDB critics out there, howevever, there are many more industry who have seen the software and have an upbeat assessment. Here are a few examples:
http://tinyurl.com/5ogg9x
http://tinyurl.com/6ksrhr
And anyone who is interested can have a look for themselves: http://tinyurl.com/495tsq