MegerMania
MergerMania continues, particularly
among the large systems vendors, adding to their On
Demand/Adaptive Computing/Systems Management/You Name it – but
we know it when we see it portfolios.
Of course, we saw this one coming from a long way out, but
I don’t think we realized how long it would last (or, perhaps,
how many interesting little companies there were out there to snap
up). We’re now
guessing that MergerMania will continue well into 2006.
IBM
IBM has really been hitting for the
fences in the merger and acquisition game, buying up a number of
small companies this spring, including prior acquisitions GlueCode
(see Opinions, June 9, 2005 issue) and Ascential.
IBM has now purchased Isogon, who offers
software for managing applications on mainframe computers, and
Meiosys, a French company which provides software technologies to
enable applications to be dynamically moved from one server or set
of servers to others without disruption.
IBM will incorporate Isogon’s software
with the IBM Tivoli product offerings, complementing existing
products that track the inventory and usage of applications in a
distributed server environment.
Terms of the deal, for privately held
Isogon, were not disclosed. The
transaction is expected to close in the third quarter.
The Meiosys products are intended to
support IBM’s UNIX and Linux offerings and to provide
application relocation for transparent, stateful application
mobility and fault-tolerant computing, in most cases, transparent
to the application, so that applications do not need to be
modified or recompiled. MetaCluster, a product line from Meiosys,
offers application mobility and relocation technology in the
high-performance computing sector. The products are very efficient
and responsive with low overhead to the system.
IBM intends to apply this technology across its
high-performance computing and deep-computing product lines
IBM will be integrating the company's
technology into its products and offerings, with initial
deliveries planned in the second half of this year.
Meiosys integrates now with IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager
software.
IBM has long been committed to focusing on
middleware (infrastructure) software and partnering with ISVs for
applications software to create solutions.
All of their recent acquisitions continue in this vein.
Sun
During JavaOne, Sun Microsystems announced
that it had acquired SeeBeyond software for $387 million in cash.
The acquisition is intended to provide a Business
Integration piece for Sun’s (and the industry’s) increasing
interest in the SOA market.
Little SeeBeyond had trailing 12 month
revenues of $167 million, but 2,000 customers worldwide and Sun
looks to them to help provide a complete offering for the
development, deployment and management of enterprise applications
and SOAs. Sum expects
the SeeBeyond acquisition to make them a better partner for
systems integrators, whom Sun largely depends upon for the
implementation of customer solutions. (Unlike IBM, and to a much lesser degree HP, Sun does not
field its own systems integration and consulting organization.)
SeeBeyond's Integrated Composite Application
Network (ICAN) Suite includes back-office integration, B2B
integration, ETL Master Data Management, Business Process
Management, Workflow, Business Activity Monitoring, Application
Adapters, and a suite of graphical development tools for composite
application creation based on web services.
Sun’s strategy calls for integrating
software and services into its Enterprise System portfolio which
includes its Open Solaris operating system, Sun Java System
Application Platform Suite, Sun Java System Communication Suite,
Sun Java System Identity Management Suite, Sun Java System
Availability Suite and Sun Java System Web Infrastructure Suite.
SeeBeyond will form a sixth Java Enterprise System, the Sun Java
System Integration Suite.
The transaction is expected to close in the
fall of 2005, subject to regulatory approval.
Oracle
Like IBM, Oracle has been out hunting
acquisitions, hoping to add to its highly successful PeopleSoft
venture.
It has now acquired ProfitLogic, a privately
held provider of Retail Profit Optimization solutions.
ProfitLogic's software analyzes customer demand patterns to help
retailers make inventory, pricing and merchandising decisions.
Oracle intends to sell it into the retail industry together with
its recent Retek acquisition and its Oracle infrastructure and ERP
software.
Previously, Oracle acquired TimesTen, a
privately held supplier of real-time data management software
which provides infrastructure software for managing events
transactions, and data for a number of performance-critical
applications in telecom, networking, securities trading and other
industries. Oracle
looks to TimesTen to be an extension to its Oracle database and
middleware offerings.
Computer
Associates (CA)
CA has recently moved into acquisition
move, indicating that it is perhaps ready to put its accounting
and reorganizational troubles behind it.
It’s starting small, acquiring
privately held Tiny Software, a desktop firewall vendor, to add to
its security offerings in anti-spyware and anti-spam.
CA will continue to offer the Tiny solutions as standalone
offerings as it integrates them into its eTrust Integrated Threat
Management portfolio. The
product is supported on Windows for 32- and 64- bit platforms.
CA has also acquired IT governance
software vendor Niku for $350 million.
Previous CA software acquisitions in the
past year have included Netegrity for $430m, and Concord
Communications for $350m.
CA has also recently announced a move to
flexible capacity-based pricing for its low-MIPS mainframe users
who use emulated z architecture and System/390 environments from
companies such as Cornerstone and T3 Technologies.
This gives these customers access to appropriate mainframe
tools at reasonable prices, especially for environments like
development and testing.
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