IBM Wednesday announced it bought Collation, a privately held company that makes application resource mapping software. IBM acquired the Redwood City, Calif., company for an undisclosed amount.

Collation's flagship Confignia software is designed to map interdependencies among IT resources so staff can more easily discover the source of application performance problems. It captures information about databases, switches, routers, load balancers, Web servers and application servers that comprise an application environment, then records configuration parameters and tracks changes made.

The idea is to help IT staff understand the impact of changes to an IT environment -- such as how installing a security patch could trigger a series of unexpected problems.

"Without a solid understanding of how different pieces of the IT puzzle fit together, a single change can slow down or halt an entire system," said Al Zollar, general manager of IBM's Tivoli software group, in a statement. "Collation software allows companies to visualize different change scenarios so they can analyze the implications before problems occur."

The combination of Collation's software and IBM's Tivoli systems management products will let customers model what will happen when an IT change is made, as well as test their environments for unauthorized changes, IBM says. Users will be able to better manage software deployments and shorten the time it takes to release new applications or update existing ones, the vendor says.

Application management is particularly important as more and more enterprises deploy composite application environments and virtualized infrastructures, according to Jasmine Noel, a principal analyst at research firm Ptak, Noel & Associates. The combination creates a dynamic environment that magnifies the need for application management.

"Application managers cannot know with any certainty what the runtime application composition looks like unless it is actually discovered from the production environment," Noel says. "Understanding the dependences between application components running on virtualized hardware across a distributed network to deliver a single service transaction is what IBM gets with the Collation acquisition."

The acquisition also strengthens IBM’s configuration management database lineup, and helps close the gap between IBM and BMC, Noel says.