IBM Eye

IBM bought privately held Consul last week beefing up an already beefy Tivoli line with better security audit capabilities. Consul has worked with IBM for some time (see the case study on consul’s website here) so IBM must have liked what they saw. A couple things that I found interesting:

Per Computer Business Review:

This is not simply just another partner deal. While Consul has long offered RACF-based products, the real driver for the deal is recently developed, patent pending technology that correlates user access patterns from the cryptic logs maintained by various access control subsystems.

Once the deal is consummated, the Consul offerings would fill a major gap in Tivoli’s access management portfolio. Today, Tivoli Access Management can provision user privileges on a centralized basis. And thanks to this year’s acquisition of Micromuse, Tivoli has a network event correlation engine. But until now, Tivoli had no way of correlating user access patterns, or correlating user access with system events.

IBM has continued fleshing out Tivoli with its fat wallet, purchasing Vallent Corporation, a privately held company that makes software allowing Cell Phone providers to granularly monitor its network quality for a purported $200 million. Consolidation has been happening fast in the OSS space and it looks like convergence is playing out such that there will be half a dozen or so major players in a year or two:

• Amdocs
• HP
• IBM
• Oracle
• Telcordia

Smaller, independent players such as Vallent and Intec ripe for being brought into the fold of a larger company. So far this year, Oracle has bought MetaSolv, Amdocs - Cramer, CA - Wily and Syndesis picked up CoManage.) And Telcordia, who I described above as a survivor, is rumored to be for sale and in talks with SAP.

Anyhow, with the merger, IBM becomes the leader in quality of service tools for the wireless side of the telecom industry. Vallent Corporation specializes in wireless network and service performance management to help mobile operators forestall network outages and gauge the real-time quality of service being experienced by customers connected to their networks. Network failures are costly from a lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction standpoint so the QoS tools Vallent sells are indespensible. Vallent was formed by the mergers of Watchmark, Comnitel and Metica and, as such, nearly every carrier in the world uses their products. The private company is thought to have annual revenues of aroung $70 million with a sales price of $200 million.

Most notably, the Vallent acquisition will enhance IBM’s partnership network by adding many deep relationships with big names around the world the world. Per telecom industry pub Light Reading:

The move will bolster IBM’s position as one of the OSS industry’s biggest players, as Vallent, which has more than 200 mobile operator customers, will give the IT giant a wealth of wireless carrier contracts and wireless service assurance capabilities.

This seems like a great acquisition (Don’t they all? What’s a couple hundred million to us?). As they have demonstrated with contracts with Telstra Corporation and Bharti Airtel, IBM seems to be one of the few players with whom companies feel comfortable inking major dollar, many year deals. IBM gets a major arrow in its quiver with the QoS tools and the added (primary?) benefit of a huge rolodex ripe for the upsell.

IBM has purchased Internet Security Systems Inc. (ISSX), an IBM partner since 1999, for $1.3 Billion.  ISS started in 1994 with one product, Internet Scanner, and has grown to a suite of security offerings including the ISS X-Force Intelligence Service credited with discovering a number of Microsoft security vulnerabilities in recent months.  This is IBM’s forth acquisition this month, and its 5th largest of all time, but hey, who’s counting.

Kristof Kloeckner, vice president of strategy and technology for IBM’s software group, was interviewed about the purchase by the Washington Post. 

He said, “We have enough freedom to do whatever is required to strengthen our business. We do not feel constrained”.  I think in this case someone should have constrained him.

From where I sit here in the cheap seats, it looks as though IBM has made its first bad acquisition of the year.  (more…)

Admittedly, I’d never heard of MRO Software until this announcement.  They make an asset and service management system and have a decent client list.  IBM intends to roll this into Tivoli.  I am philosophically in favor of IBM buying capabilities and a foothold in the market… particularly when it can be done on the cheap (not to say this was… time will tell).  The Maximo Enterprise Suite, MRO’s flagship product, integrates pretty well with a number of ERPs and is considered by the analyst quoted in Ecommerce Times to be best of breed in that space. Greg Osuri of soa-blog.com echoed the positive sentiment, stating that the purchase “would change the critics’ thinking on IBM’s seriousness in their SOA practice”.