Microsoft acquires MOM connector maker, Engyro; will cease selling MOM 2005 connectors

On Monday, Microsoft dropped the news of the acquisition during a keynote speech at TechEd by Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the server and tools business at Microsoft [1]. Privately held Engyro, Cincinnati, makes the Product Connector Suite which helps enterprises with event sharing and synchronization between Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and other management tools. The news of this buy was overshadowed by the other news tidbit in Muglia’s speech, that Linux distro maker Xandros has gone the way of Novell [2] and licensed intellectual property from Microsoft as a way to choke off the threat of lawsuits. [3]

Interestingly, while Microsoft says it will continue to support existing customers of Engyro MOM 2005 products, in a FAQ posted on the Engyro website, [4] it says it will no longer sell MOM 2005 related Connectors, Agents, or Management Packs. Instead, it wants those customers to upgrade to the 2007 connectors and presumably to Operations Manger 2007. (Specifically, the FAQ says: "Microsoft will support existing Engyro MOM 2005 Connector customers with rights to upgrade to the Operations Manager 2007 Connectors.") Note that mainstream support for MOM 2005 does not end until Jan. 12 2010 and that extended support will run until Jan. 13, 2015. So 2005 is hardly a dead product. 

Engyro is an interesting buy for Microsoft in that its goal is to let Microsoft management products play nicely with others -- namely Tivoli TEC, HP OpenView Operations, Remedy ARS and a few others.

Most enterprises stitch together best of breed tools to manage their networks, systems and applications. These often don’t share event data, which makes it hard for the IT staff to do cross-platform, business system level, correlation analysis. Product Connector Suite aims to fill that gap.

While Microsoft vows that its interest in Engyro is to help MOM customers interoperate with their enterprise management products, it is curious that its first move is to cut the 2005 connector. Microsoft itself makes connectors as do other of its third-party partners. Or maybe, if a software vendor wants new licensing revenue every two years, it makes sense not let interoperability drag on via third-party products.

Blogger Ian Blyth says the move is good for MOM users, [5] provided it doesn’t kill off the budding competition in MOM connectors:

“Engyro [has] grown and as well as connectors [has] MPs for VMWareESX, Linux (RedHat and SuSe), UNIX (Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX), Oracle, MYSQL and Apache. This begs the question of what will become of companies like Skywire, Jalasoft and eXc Software. One of the big areas of concern from customers was getting their MOM components from different suppliers. This announcement plus the announcement in March at the MMS about EMC Smarts being part of the next version of SCOM puts Microsoft up there with a single heterogeneous monitoring solution with connectivity. Talking to a few MOM specialists over the last two months about what they were planning to use for some monitoring and Engyro came up consistently.”

What do you think of the end of 2005 connectors?

What other companies should Microsoft buy? Check out the discussion here. [6]