The big boys in storage management are targeting the assets of smaller companies to augment their product lines. Of course, the real winner wont be the company with the most acquisitions. Success will be determined by the speed and efficiency with which heavy hitters such as EMC Corp. and Veritas Software Corp. can integrate their newly acquired products.
EMCs acquisition of Astrum Software Corp. allows it to add storage resource management capabilities to its Control Center storage management family line. Astrums file-level, Active Policy-based management should make management easier for EMC customers.
Veritas big acquisitions of Precise Software Solutions Inc. and Jareva Technologies Inc. will allow it to move beyond its storage manager past and become a manager of applications and servers.
Plugging in these vendors technologies while entering the server performance and application management markets will be a tall task for Veritas, but the potential rewards are too great to pass up.
Tight application integration will be the key to EMCs and Veritas success or failure. New and old applications need to be able to communicate and share data easily. Once management data can be shared, these applications must be able to work together to solve problems.
Enterprise storage management is extremely difficult today because of the huge number of products available and the fact that each of these products tends to have its own interface. Therefore, a standardized user interface should be a goal for all these vendors. After all, dumping a bunch of new tools in the laps of overworked IT managers (none of whom wants to learn yet another interface) is bound to fail.
Senior Analyst Henry Baltazar can be reached at henry_baltazar@ziffdavis.com.
