Sun
Enhances N-1 With Provisioning:
Acquisition Of Centerrun
Sun’s
N-1 offering is continuing to grow by acquisition.
In addition to the acquisitions of Terraspring in November,
2002 and Pirus Networks last September, Sun continues to grow N-1 by
an acquisition model. Terraspring
(a company that provides technology to automate the deployment of
software across multiple servers) and Pirus (who offered hardware
and software for virtualization in heterogeneous environments) are
now part of the N-1 portfolio.
Terraspring contributes asset mapping and Pirus offer
communication with storage hardware.
This
week, Sun announced its intention to acquire CenterRun.
Its software automates the provisioning of software
applications, from installation to incremental updates and patches,
all without the need for human intervention.
There is, of course, a kind of division of labor; the human
part of IT checks the change to see that it works correctly, then
checks it into CenterRun for implementation.
Today,
CenterRun is a multi-platform product.
Sun pledges to keep it that way, although they believe that
Sun customers will prefer it on Sun Solaris.
(We hope they avoid the software acquisition trap of pledging
support to other platforms and then failing to provide timely
updates. That would be
too bad.)
Sun
seems pleased that its newest acquisition provisions at the
application level, rather than at the operating system level.
But we have yet to see anyone’s full portfolio for this
important new automated systems management market – and there are
lots of other acquisitions still to be made – so we will bide our
time before declaring a winner.
This
product is already shipping, with a distinguished customer list, so
we’d expect Sun to keep it shipping, adding to its presence in
this new market.
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