IBM continues its pre-Christmas shopping spree
Unlike the rest of us, IBM doesn't seem to want to wait for the January sales! Having bolstered its composite application development capabilities with yesterday's
acquisition of Bowstreet, it followed-up today with the proposed (subject to shareholder approval) far heftier $865M acquisition of San Francisco-based and (and excuse the parochialism) UK-originated Micromuse.
Micromuse plugs an obvious gap in IBM's IT service management portfolio, bringing much-needed network discover, monitoring and fault management capabilities - based on Netcool/OMNIbus, Proviso and Precision - as well as security event management - based on Micromuse's
July acquisition of GuardedNet - and application-level impact analysis - based on Netcool/Impact.
With enterprises and service providers alike grappling with the management challenges of IP-based network convergence and new services, such as VoIP and
IMS, IBM needed a credible response. This acquisition certainly seems to do that, particularly as there is already integration between Netcool and IBM's Tivoli Enterprise Console, NetView and Change and Configuration Management Database (via the November
acquisition of Collation and its Confignia product).
Since the acquisition is still subject to approval, IBM was unable to go into too much detail about the integration plans. Once they are, I will be looking to see whether and how they plan to use Netcool to address storage network management as a response to EMC's plans with
SMARTS (which coincidentally was
acquired a year ago today). I, and I am sure many of Micromuse's existing customers, will also be hoping for some clear statements about the future of a number of Micromuse's existing partnerships which take on a new complexion with IBM now in control - specifically those with BMC, CA/Concord, HP/Peregrine, Tibco from a technology perspective and Accenture from a services perspective.
And there's still two days to go before the Christmas weekend!
