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In its latest move to bolster its on-demand offerings, IBM today scooped up longtime partner Candle Corp.
Candle, a privately held company in El Segundo, Calif., makes tools to help companies build, run and manage their IT infrastructures. IBM said the tools will help users manage on-demand operating environments.
Customer need drove IBMs move to acquire Candle, said Steve Mills, IBMs senior vice president and group executive in charge of the IBM Software Group.
“Were always looking at our customers needs and demands in the middleware space, and monitoring capabilities was an area where we thought we needed to fill in,” Mills said. “Our needs and their [Candles] capabilities came together.”
Candles business is primarily in the systems management and monitoring space. An IBM partner since 1976, Candle has marketed tools for monitoring many of IBMs software environments, from its MVS mainframe operating system to DB2 monitoring tools, WebSphere monitoring tools and MQ monitoring tools.
“Candle is well-known for its mainframe portfolio, and its distributed [computing] portfolio is almost exclusively shaped around the IBM middleware portfolio of products,” Mills said.
Mills said the market for tools to monitor distributed systems “is still an emerging opportunity; that area is one where theres not a lot of competition.” However, in the mainframe arena, the IBM/Candle tandem will compete with companies such as BMC Software Inc. and Computer Associates International Inc., Mills said.
“We think well get a lot of leverage from the Candle portfolio by pushing it through the large IBM field organization,” he said.
IBM will continue to develop and support the Candle PathWAI and Omegamon products and merge the solutions into IBMs portfolio in areas such as the DB2 space, Mills said.
However, Candle will not become a sixth IBM software brand, company officials said. The bulk of the Candle technology will fall under the management of Robert LeBlanc, general manager of IBMs Tivoli division. But company officials said some Candle technology will find its way into the WebSphere, DB2 and Lotus brands.
Financial terms of the acquisition, expected to close in the second quarter of this year, were not disclosed. Mills said he expects IBM to move quickly to integrate Candle and its roughly 800 employees.
“Our track record around acquiring companies has been quite good,” he said. IBM last month acquired middleware management maker Trigo Technologies.
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