BMC Software on May 29 announced its intent to acquire privately held performance analytics company ProactiveNet.
BMC would not disclose how much it agreed to pay for the company, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif. But BMC believes that ProactiveNet, which markets end-to-end application performance monitoring and analytics software, brings it a competitive advantage against its largest rivals, IBM/Tivoli, CA and Hewlett-Packard with its OpenView line, according to Tom Drain, program manager at BMC in Houston.
“This will really accelerate our value proposition and give us an edge over our competition,” he said.
ProactiveNets namesake software is a self-learning tool that baselines the performance of all the attributes it learns about. It then determines what a normal operating environment is for each attribute. Intelligent thresholds then follow the performance of each attribute, whether its CPU utilization, the number of SQL write requests waiting, or the size of the Java bean pool on an application server.
The software then looks for abnormalities, rather than sifting through thousands of events.
Proactivenet, which has over 150 customers, brings to the table the ability to eliminate false-positive alerts and reduce alert activity so that operations management teams can be more productive. It installs in a fraction of the time it takes to deploy large-scale event monitoring and event management systems.
“This provides much more rapid time to value for our performance management tools,” said Drain. “[Most] monitoring tools require that you set a lot of thresholds and then maintain them. So there is quite a bit of administrative overhead we can eliminate with Proactivenets dynamic threshold capability. It can also capture the problem much sooner than you could with older technologies. And because it can do those analytics, we can do better filtering before [events are] handed off to an event management tool.”
Once the acquisition is complete, BMC intends to package the ProactiveNet software with its performance management tools and the BMC Event Manager.
“It can collect information from other third-party tools, so we could package it with our event management solution or sit on top of our performance management products and act as a lighter version of our event management tool for smaller environments,” Drain said.
Although BMC has an OEM partnership with ProactiveNets rival Netuititive, BMC chose to acquire ProactiveNet because of the breadth of its patented technology.
“They are much broader in scope and domain skill set and knowledge,” said Drain.
ProactiveNet also competes with Integrien, which today launched version 5.6 of its Alive software.
“BMCs acquisition of Proactivenet is a validation of what we do,” reacted Adrian Tudor, vice president of engineering at Integrien in Irvine, Calif.
BMC, which hopes to complete the acquisition in the next two weeks, intends to bring on ProactiveNets executive team intact as a part of BMCs Distributed Systems Management organization under Israel Gat.