* What industry consolidation means to enterprise customers
As vendors continue to shop for new technologies, enterprise IT customers must wonder what all the acquisition activity will mean for them. While it will take some time for the dust to settle and for integration work to get under way, consolidation among network performance vendors should help IT managers optimize their investments.
Acquisition news last week from Compuware and F5 Networks goes to show that vendors are not slowing down their shopping. For them, the price is right to pick up technologies, and for customers, it could mean getting more capabilities from their vendors.
Compuware, an application management vendor, plans to acquire Adlex, a maker of service delivery management software, for about $36 million in cash. The Adlex technology, Compuware says, will add agent-less end-user monitoring and application performance insight to Compuware’s Vantage software.
As for F5, the application traffic management vendor acquired the assets of Watchfire’s AppShield Web application firewall technology and plans to integrate it into F5’s own TrafficShield products.
Recent news of acquisitions from vendors such as Juniper Networks – which scooped up two vendors, Peribit and Redline Networks, to broaden its reach in the enterprise market – indicate a good buying climate for vendors, but can also mean better products for customers. And longtime rivals Akamai and Speedera merged recently, which will add customer accounts and make certain lawsuits go away for Akamai.
Computer Associates in April announced its buying plans, which would land CA two well-respected technologies – network performance management from Concord and root-cause analysis and fault management from Aprisma – and pump up CA’s systems and security management product lines. Micromuse also picked up Quallaby, which gave the network fault management vendor access to performance management technology.
A recent paper from Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala suggests the acquisition mania in the network and application performance and acceleration markets will benefit enterprise network managers in the long run. Also the analyst indicates that consolidation among vendors will continue, helping end users (IT managers) also consolidate their vendor relationships.
The paper also recommends enterprise customers, “shorten your list of network performance management vendors… and if you’re evaluating a network performance management vendor that is searching for funding, it’s better to look elsewhere.”
