BMC Buys Neptuny Software to Bolster Cloud Portfolio

The acquisition of Neptuny's Caplan product line will enable BMC to create a new software package for managing hybrid heterogeneous environments.

Another major software vendor has made a move to update its catalog to include new tools for building private cloud systems.

Business service management and automation software provider BMC on Oct. 5 acquired the software business of Neptuny, an Italian-based provider of capacity management and information technology performance optimization software. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition of Neptuny's Caplan product line will enable BMC to create a new software package for managing hybrid heterogeneous environments -- whether physical, virtual or cloud.

Following the acquisition, Neptuny will become the service provider for customers using their products under the aegis of BMC.

Neptuny's software provides around-the-clock capacity optimization, which helps organizations balance computing requirements throughout their IT environments. Neptuny also incorporates business and application key performance indicators with computing, network, storage, power and cooling metrics into capacity management, enabling enterprises to better optimize their infrastructure.

This makes it possible for companies to better assess and project hardware needs.

The capacity-planning and management market has been reinvigorated as enterprises have started to increase their adoption of virtualization in their production environments, Gartner Research Vice President Milind Govekar told eWEEK.

"This growth is also due to the interest in cloud (private and public) environments. Workloads have to be optimized in physical, virtual and cloud environments to deliver appropriate performance service levels at optimal cost, without over-provisioning resources," Govekar said. "Traditional capacity-planning and management tools that dealt with mainly static environments are necessary, but insufficient to deal with these new dynamic environments."

Acquisition strengthens capacity management

BMC's acquisition of Neptuny, particularly in the distributed systems area, will enable BMC to compete more effectively in the virtualized and cloud capacity management area, Govekar said.

"BMC's capacity-planning products are deep and have breadth on the mainframe. However, their distributed systems products lacked breadth, and are sometimes perceived as difficult to use and deploy," Govekar said. "Caplan fills the technology gaps, but there is also overlap in some areas, such as modeling. In the performance analysis and reporting area for distributed systems, BMC resold Solution Labs' Performance Surveyor product. This relationship has come to an end, because Caplan also provides this functionality."

BMC customers looking at investing in capacity-planning and management tools in the distributed systems area should add Caplan to their short lists, Govekar said.

"Gartner expects BMC to invest in Caplan and continue with the development team based in Italy. However, those who use BMC's tools in distributed systems environments should request an integration and development road map for the two products to take advantage of the additional functionality that Caplan brings and minimize functional overlap," Govekar said.

"If the existing tool is underutilized, then BMC customers should actively look at the option of replacing it with Caplan as part of a license-swap agreement."