IBM acquires Cyanea

IBM Thursday announced it has acquired for an undisclosed amount application monitoring software maker Cyanea Systems.

In the deal, the Oakland, Calif., company will operate as part of IBM’s application management division, and IBM will use Cyanea’s Cyanea/One software to round out this new product division, headed up by Cyanea President and CEO James Chong. The Cyanea technology will be combined with Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance software and the Pathway technology IBM acquired in April with its purchase of Candle Corp. 

Robert LeBlanc, former general manager of Tivoli and now general manager of the Application & Integration Middleware Division (WebSphere), says the addition of Cyanea’s Cyanea/One software will provide the application lifecycle and development insight into application performance and Java 2 Enterprise Edition knowledge needed in Tivoli’s offerings.

“Cyanea will provide multiple IT people, from developers to operations, with unique user interfaces while still using a common foundation to determine application problems,” LeBlanc says.

Chong adds, “Our software will allow Tivoli software to provide a means to drill down and look closer at the details of the development. It is a little bit higher set of skills than what was available.”

Chong says the majority of application management tools today are based on resource usage and management, but the problem needs to be addressed from an application point of view, not a resource point of view. Cyanea covers applications from development to testing to production on a common platform, Chong says. This allows the software to provide a common language for the three groups of people to communicate more effectively and more quickly determine the causes of application problems and resolve the issues in the necessary realm: development, testing or production.

“This, combined with technology we have at IBM, will offer more depth of application problem determination,” LeBlanc says.

IBM says Cyanea will fall under the Tivoli brand and complement WebSphere middleware and Rational application testing software. For Tivoli, Cyanea will integrate for transaction monitoring, application management and zSeries performance tools. For WebSphere, Cyanea will help ensure the success of WebSphere-based implementations by providing troubleshooting capabilities throughout the application lifecycle for areas such as memory management and transaction problems. And for Rational, IBM says Cyanea capabilities will help Rational provide deeper application performance analysis capabilities to WebSphere developers for distributed and host-based WebSphere instances.

Industry watchers say despite IBM’s multiple acquisitions and development work toward providing an “end-to-end” perspective for application management, Big Blue still has some work to do.

“[IBM still needs to add] mapping infrastructure relationships at the service level. Cyanea can do some of that but only for J2EE platforms — and enterprise companies have a lot more than just J2EE,” says Jasmine Noel, principal at Ptak, Noel & Associates. “Likely [acquisition] targets are Collation and Troux.”

IBM says this acquisition will further its application management strategy and put it ahead of competitors such as HP and Mercury Interactive, who have also acquired technology to build out their application management products.

Cyanea will be integrated immediately into the IBM Software Group. Seventy-five Cyanea employees will move to IBM’s payroll. IBM says it will announce a product roadmap emerging from the Cyanea, Candle and Tivoli technology offerings in the next 60 days.