IBM has agreed to buy systems management vendor BigFix for an undisclosed sum.
The move brings BigFix’s IT management technology into IBM’s fold, bolstering its configuration and compliance management capabilities and building on an existing partnership between the two companies. According to Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli Software, BigFix’s platform automates and simplifies endpoint management for large environments.
“BigFix will really help us fulfill what is really a critical need for many of our clients, and that is dealing with the endpoints that make up the core point of access for many of their IT systems and services,” he said.
“This is about helping our customers make their operations smarter, including this notion of a smarter data center,” he continued. “Of course in the data center, this command center has got to involve the full data center assets-server and storage devices … [and] now of course the endpoint.”
Founded in 1997, BigFix has more than 200 employees. Once the acquisition is completed, BigFix will be integrated into the IBM Software Group. The company competes mostly with Symantec’s Altiris technology, as well as Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), BigFix CEO Dave Robbins said.
“By and large our mission in life is to go remove the shackles of SCCM from our IT customers and free them to do other things that are more important [and] save them a lot of money,” Robbins said.
The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.