Last week Network management point-product vendor Solarwinds Inc.(NYSE: SWI) announced that it is acquiring Storage Management vendor Tek-Toolsfor $42M in cash and stock.
I can understand the need for the acquisition and I would say that it is probably a good move by solarwinds to fill a gap in their portfolio. We(ManageEngine) have had storage network management since 2005 (ManageEngine OpStor) and until recently Storage Network management had predominantly been a large enterprise affair. But the current drive towards server consolidation and virtualization is actually propping up the need for Storage networks and Storage management among mid-sized enterprises and Solarwind's need to include Storage management in it's portfolio is probably justified.
What is surprising to me is the terms of the deal. Why did Solarwinds pay $42M for a company with revenues of $4M and an operating loss of $3M? Seems that the good old days of dot com valuations are back :) Either Solarwinds is very desparate or Storage Management has suddenly become the killer "must-have" technology in 2010 ! (very unlikely, but even then does not justify the steep valuations)
Solarwinds used to be an engineering company focused on building good products. Maybe the pressure of being a public company is forcing them to show results quickly. They have acquired ipMonitor (for Server and Application management functionality), Kiwi (for log management), Lan Surveyor (for Layer 2 discovery) and now Tek-Tools for Storage management. Acquiring disparate products and integrating them at a GUI level may provide short-term boosts to revenue, but it is exactly this kind of headache that customers hate when dealing with the Big 4. (And Solarwinds would know this better than anyone else :) )
Anyway, customers who don't like this "Acquire and perform brand level integration" strategy can check out the more complete portfolio of Enteprise IT Management products from ManageEngine here.
For now I would like to wager a bet that Solarwinds is working on a free Desktop Storage management tool that can monitor a tiny unit of storage(like say 1GB) for a minuscule amount of time(60 minutes?) to bait customers similar to this. But we know that customers can use Google to find better deals like this.
The chart above shows what Joe is seeing today. CRM Server availability is around 30% in a week.
The chart below tells Joe that the company is losing $242K per week because of the failure of CRM.
At ManageEngine we believe that if we empower Joe by giving him visibility into the Business Impact of an IT failure, Joe will be able to do different things to improve the efficiency of IT Operations. (Update : Thanks to Doug McClure who was the first person I came across with a clear understanding of the goal of BSM. ) And with ManageEngine IT360 you can get started with what is now known as "Common Sense BSM".
If you have a Joe in your organization you can empower them by downloading ManageEngine IT360. You can also see a live demo here.
Even after all this, Joe still needs to understand that when everything is working fine, nobody is going to call him and thank him. Welcome to IT, Joe :)

End-User Transaction monitoring for measuring response time of Business processes like Order Processing etc.
BSM Features
Business Service Container - The ability to map all of the infrastructure components above into the underlying Business Service

Application Dependency Mapping - IT360 allows you to visualize the relationships between the Business Service and the underlying IT Infrastructure
Business Level Metrics - IT360 offers the ability to extract IT specific metrics like Server downtime or Response time of an ecommerce application and translate it into Business level metrics like "$ of revenue lost" or "# of Orders processed per hour". This is the fundamental goal of BSM. ie. Enabling IT operation staff to see how a failure in IT affects the Business. With this visibility IT operations staff will be able to hopefully make different (and better) decisions regarding how they handle these IT failures.
IT360 can fetch Business metrics from a variety of data sources. With Support for "database query monitors", "custom script monitors", "JMX adaptors" and a variety of other monitors, information can be pulled from any data source as long as it is out there.
IT360 also includes an ITIL ServiceDesk to automate Incident, Problem and Change Management processes - again within the context of a Business Service.
There is nothing in the market today that packages all this functionality into one affordable, easy-to-use package. And IT360 allows you to evolve from managing the network to managing the business without requiring any major investments in software purchase or implementation times. And for once your IT operations team will not see it as management pushing some new jargon from the top.
Don't take my word for it. View the online demo or download the Beta