IBM Gets Storage BI with Novus Acquisition

Global 2000 software and services provider Novus fills a big gap in IBM's storage portfolio.

IBM on Oct. 24 announced that it will acquire NovusCG, a storage-focused IT software and services company based in Manassas, Va. As is common in transactions involving privately held companies, financial terms were not disclosed.

NovusCG (Novus Consulting Group) was founded in 2000 and has about 100 employees. The company uses its own professional services methodology, called Xcelleration, to provide software and services to Global 2000 companies and the federal government in the areas of storage infrastructure optimization, disaster recovery and business continuity, compliance management, and managed services.

Specifically, Novus brings a new level of business intelligence and storage analytics—which IBM lacked—to the companys arsenal of storage software service offerings.

The new functions Novus brings to IBM include the MCF (Management Complexity Factor), a patent-pending tools-driven methodology that allows Novus to identify the quantitative and qualitative causes of complexity in an environment, and provide step-by-step strategies for removing it, along with business and cost justifications for each step.

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Click here to read about IBMs recent acquisition of data management specialist Princeton Softech.

Another offering, ESP (Enterprise Standardization Program), allows Novus to assist clients in standardizing storage and backup best practices at a level that allows clients to have (and more importantly, use) these best practices in heterogeneous and diverse environments. This is delivered in standard and custom software that can include customer-specific standards and processes.

Finally, Novus SERP (Storage Enterprise Resource Planning) software gives clients business-related information about their storage assets. It provides analytics both for the IT department and the companys business decision makers.

"We [IBM] have been a leader for a long time in this [storage] area, but even as a leader we saw some gaps that we had," Val Rahmani, general manager of Infrastructure Management Services at IBM Global Technology Services, in New York, told eWEEK.

The area of storage analytics "is something clients have been worried about for a long time, but its been difficult for them to do. Just consolidating a bunch of disks hasnt been something thats been interesting. They havent had enough business insight to let them do that. What were hoping is to take the unique product set and the skills that Novus has, pull it together with the global reach of IBM, and make that available to a lot of clients who we know have to do this but havent had a good way to do it so far," Rahmani said.

NovusCG also will complement IBMs core System Storage portfolio of disk, tape and virtualization products as a key element in optimizing and establishing storage tiers, the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media in order to reduce total storage cost, Rahmani said.

IBMs acquisition of NovusCG ups the ante in its battle against EMC in the storage marketplace. IBM is currently the world market leader in storage services and in branded tape storage, according to IDG (International Data Group) reports. EMC, the world market leader in disk-driven storage and in storage software, has acquired 37 companies in the last six years to gain a number of new technologies it had lacked.

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