IBM
Acquires More Software For Its Portfolio
Acquiring
software – as technology or as entire companies – continues to
be an important task for successful software and systems companies. IBM has been particularly active in the past year.
Here are two more additions to the IBM software portfolio.
Cyanea
IBM
purchased Cyanea, a leading provider of software that monitors and
manages the performance of Web-based business applications. Cyanea's software allows business applications written in
Java™ (as well as CICS® and
IMS™), operating across mainframe and distributed computing
environments, to run faster and with less downtime. The technology
is designed to diagnose and troubleshoot problems before they affect
response time. It also tracks application performance over time to
help companies more intelligently plan information-technology
purchases and deployments. Cyanea’s capabilities will make an
important contribution to IBM’s efforts to provide advanced
application management tools that operate across platforms.
IBM
plans to integrate the privately held company’s operations into
its Tivoli systems management software business, and the technology
will be integrated into Tivoli, WebSphere, and Rational offerings.
Cyanea products became available from IBM immediately.
Alphablox Corporation
Business Intelligence (BI) is moving away from being off-line
analysis to being combined with real-time information, affecting
transactions in process. Alphablox
software enables customers and business partners to embed analytics
-- such as customer buying trends -- into existing business
processes, and makes information available to a wide spectrum of
users and applications. The software helps organizations boost
business insight by accessing data from across the enterprise and
then enables the presentation of that information in a customized
way.
IBM already had a range of BI analysis tools, but lacked the
technology to embed the resulting analysis into the process. Now,
IBM will enable developers with the ability to build business
applications that offer multiple views of real-time information from
a variety of data sources. The
platform will be a foundation for delivering BI solutions such as
data warehousing and compliance as well as business performance
management.
Since
Alphablox’ technology was widgets and piece parts, rather than an
application, it’s a particularly good fit for the IBM “tools not
applications” philosophy. AlphaBlox
was in the business of connecting IBM and competitors J2EE servers,
portals, data bases, and IBM will continue doing that, but it will
also embed AlphaBlox into various IBM products starting with the BI
products very soon. AlphaBlox technology will show up in Business Performance
Management products in the first half of 2005.
A combination of Alphablox and IBM software will enable front-line
managers to make faster decisions impacting business strategies,
plans and forecasts. For
instance, by delivering a visual representation of business
information, a brand manager can view up-to-the minute sales figures
for each region or be alerted to dips in inventory and make business
changes based on these results on the fly.
