BMC Buys Maker of IBM DB2 Tools

BMC Software Inc. has gobbled up yet another company, a small IBM DB2 Universal Database toolmaker, company officials told eWEEK on Wednesday—a move thats in line with its Project Golden Gate roadmap for providing data management tools that work in a heterogeneous environment.

BMC, of Houston, Texas, is paying $3 million for DGI (Database Guys Inc.), a privately held company headed up by CEO Scott Hayes, a noted DB2 expert. DGI has between 10 and 12 employees and 60 customers, including IBM, Wachovia, Visa, Putnam Investments, Victorias Secret, EDS and the Bank of New York.

The company has in recent months also acquired Remedy Corp. and IT Masters International S.A. and is integrating those companies technologies into its product line in an initiative dubbed Business Service Management.

DGI has two product families. The companys flagship product, Flight Deck, is a performance management console similar to that of BMCs SmartDBA Recovery and Management tools. It features a Web-based GUI and underlying architecture that relies on industry standards such as XML, Java and HTML. Flight Deck is PDA-compatible for real-time, remote performance management and supports Unix, Linux, Windows and DB2 8 EEE.

BMC officials plan to integrate Flight Deck into three SmartDBA tools: DBXRay, Space Expert and SQL-Explorer. Bill Miller, vice president and general manager of enterprise data management, said that Flight Deck will bring greater data capture and deeper analysis and reporting to SmartDBA. SmartDBA, for its part, will bring to the table better presentation and its cross-platform, common interface, he said.

Customers will be able to upgrade to SmartDBA Performance Management for UDB at a reduced price, officials said. BMC will continue to offer Flight Deck and SmartDBA separately until the two products are integrated later this year.

DGI also markets Classic UDB DB2 Performance Solutions, a set of troubleshooting and optimization products for databases running in a Unix environment. Such tools appeal to hardcore Unix users, with their character-driven command-line interface, officials said. The tools support DB2 8 EEE. BMC will continue the product line, officials said, which will be enhanced to support the next version of DB2 UDB.

The DGI acquisition will close toward weeks end, officials said.