SolarWinds Acquires Tek-Tools' Storage Management Suite

Network and application management software provider SolarWinds moved into the growing storage resource management business Jan. 27 when it acquired Tek-Tools' Profiler software package for $42 million in cash and stock.
Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds will bring about 60 Tek-Tools employees into its realm as a result of the transaction. Tek-Tools, based in Dallas, will remain its own business.

SolarWinds, which sells its wares to about 88,000 customers worldwide, will integrate the Tek-Tools Profiler storage and virtualization suite into its existing Orion product line. This fills the need for management of enterprise SAN infrastructure functionality in order for the company to provide a full-service IT management package.

As an option, however, SolarWinds also will sell the storage part of Profiler as a standalone product -- at least for a period of time, said Kenny Van Zant, SolarWinds' chief product strategist.

Tek-Tools' Profiler gives users visibility into the performance of both physical and virtualized storage and virtualized server infrastructures. Keeping track of fast-proliferating virtual machines is becoming a major problem in many new data centers.

"The virtualization part of Profiler actually will make it into the core of our Orion product -- it's more of a horizontal technology that influences everything," Van Zant said.

SolarWind's Orion provides network, systems and application management and reporting with its Network Performance Monitor and Application Performance Monitor.

"The collision of technologies like virtualization and cloud computing with business forces like 'lean IT' is putting pressure on IT organizations to rethink their management approach; functions that were once discrete will need to merge or collaborate more effectively," Van Zant said.

Tek-Tools' Profiler Suite will continue to branded as such for a period of time, until the functionality is integrated into the SolarWinds suite, Van Zant said.

For more information on SolarWinds, go here. For Tek-Tools information, go here.