IBM Buys TrelliSoft

When IBM calls late Wednesday afternoon and schedules an analyst briefing call for 8 a.m. the next morning, we expect they’re buying something.  We weren’t disappointed.  But we were surprised.

IBM acquired a small but very forward-looking storage management software firm, TrelliSoft, of Glen Ellyn, Illinois.  TrelliSoft offers its Storage Alert suite of Java- and web-based software which will give IBM’s Tivoli group a 12-to-18 month advantage in the marketplace over its previous plans to develop such functionality in-house.

As storage has become a more important part of the systems market, it has loomed larger in IBM’s revenue plans, and storage and storage management software has achieved greater prominence.  All of the storage vendors – hardware and software – have been announcing storage management software over the past year or two, whether acquired externally or homegrown.  That includes Sun’s acquisition at the end of 2000 of Storage Management Software firm HighGround and HP’s recent announcements of Storage Area Manager modules to its OpenView systems management software.

Since the acquisition closed at the time of the announcement, the TrelliSoft products will be integrated into the Tivoli offerings immediately and they are available, starting today, from IBM. 

TrelliSoft is a private company so financial details of the transaction were not announced, but industry sources note that the acquisition of a 35-person company are unlikely to exceed the hundred million dollar mark, far different than IBM’s recent acquisition of consulting firm PWC for $3.5 billion.  Since the firm already had customers and revenue and IBM’s marketing and business partners should enable them to reach a much larger group of customers, we’d expect the acquisition to be revenue positive.

IBM’s interest in TrelliSoft is part of its ongoing interest in meeting customer needs to manage complexity in a cost effective way.  It fits into its initiatives in Autonomic computing, with their emphasis on monitoring, predicting, self-diagnosis, and reporting.  The software emphasizes reliability and performance and it can monitor, track assets, and alert management to conditions across all types of direct attach, NAS, and SAN storage, across all major platforms including AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows (NT and 2000).

TrelliSoft will be managed as part of the Tivoli group since it is a Systems Management product, rather than as part of the Storage Software Group (which is associated with the Storage Hardware business).  It will be managed by Laura Saunders, who formerly managed the Informix integration for IBM.  Stephen Donovan, the former CEO of TrelliSoft will be joining IBM to focus on Storage Management Software strategy and customers.

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