Microsoft snapped up BlueStripe Software, a provider of application management technology, for an undisclosed amount, the companies announced on June 10. The deal will help bolster Microsoft’s on-premises and cloud monitoring capabilities, said Mike Neil, general manager of the Redmond, Wash., software giant’s Enterprise Cloud division.
“BlueStripe’s solution helps map, monitor and troubleshoot distributed applications across heterogeneous operating systems and multiple datacenter and cloud environments,” explained Neil. “BlueStripe is commonly used today by customers to extend the value of Microsoft System Center by adding application-aware infrastructure performance monitoring.”
Businesses are flocking to the cloud, Microsoft’s included, as the company’s recent spate of rosy financials can attest. Seeking a competitive advantage, corporations are increasingly branching out of their own data centers and adopting hybrid and multicloud infrastructures to process, store and analyze more business data.
BlueStripe’s technology solves the problem of providing IT managers with visibility into the health and performance of applications running on systems that are nestled in someone else’s data center and no longer under their physical control.
“Applications and data are being spread across on-premises datacenters and public, private and hosted clouds” as businesses explore agile cloud development environments and other non-traditional software and service delivery models, noted Neil. “While IT teams may not operate all of the infrastructure where the applications run, they still require visibility and the ability to manage these applications in order to support and protect the business.”
BlueStripe delivers that visibility by peering deep into how applications interact with data center IT systems, he continued. “The technology discovers and maps applications and dependencies, pinpoints problems for faster resolution, and helps maintain SLAs across complex underlying infrastructure.”
IT can also help an organization clear a faster path toward the cloud, he asserted. “By mapping the structure of distributed applications, BlueStripe also helps in the process of updating applications to more modern platforms and migrating to the cloud.”
In the wake of the buy, Microsoft is working to integrate those capabilities into its own IT management software ecosystem, particularly System Center and Operations Management Suite. In a note regarding the acquisition on the BlueStripe homepage, the company stated that customers “will see BlueStripe’s technology play an even more important role as new data center and cloud solutions come to market.”
In a message from BlueStripe co-founders Chris Neal and Vic Nyman, they wrote that their goal in starting the company “was to give IT Operations teams a way to discover, map, and monitor their complex application infrastructure. The need for real-time accurate visibility into the structure and performance of applications has increased greatly, requiring visibility across the Data Center and in the Cloud.”
As part of the integration process, Microsoft is pulling BlueStripe’s products. “We will discontinue selling the BlueStripe solutions in the near term while we work on these updates, although we will continue to support existing BlueStripe customers during this time,” informed Neil.