IBM Thursday announced it had entered into a deal to acquire a Swiss company, whose technology is intended to bolster Big Blue's systems management and virtualization product suites. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Rembo Technology, a privately-held software maker based in Geneva, Switzerland, develops products that automate the manual process of installing and updating operating systems on servers and client machines such as desktops and laptops. IBM says this acquisition, expected to be complete by the second quarter, will fill a small technology gap for IBM but more importantly also address a "major pain point" among Big Blue customers.

"The key point when looking at virtualization and IT service management is that they are both about simplifying the complexity of manual, time-consuming tasks IT is faced with every day," says Kevin Leahy, Director of Virtualization Strategy for IBM. "For organizations with tens of thousands of client machines and servers, the time, energy and effort put toward manually installing servers are just not acceptable."

Leahy says Rembo overlaps little if at all with IBM's change and configuration management software suite because Rembo software performs "the bare metal basic operating system install, and on top of those clean systems," customers can start to use Tivoli systems management products. The software will also be used in IBM's Virtualization Engine portfolio of hardware, software and servers. And the need for automation in the realm of server provisioning increases exponentially when customers also deploy virtualization technologies, he says.

"Virtualization provides the ability to create multiple images within a physical resource and they aren't static images," Leahy adds. "IT managers want to be able to change, move and provision them as the demand in workload changes. The ability to automate the end-to-end process is a tremendous help."

Rembo currently has about 800 customers and IBM will continue to sell its products. According to a press release, Big Blue will work to integrate Rembo technology into IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and IBM Director software. Rembo operations will be brought under the direction of Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli software.