EMC adds Service Desk to Data Center Management portfolio

EMC made a move yesterday that continued to show their intent and desire to compete against the Big 4 in IT Infrastructure Management (e.g., BMC, CA, HP, IBM).  All those other players have their own Service Desk offering, so it was time to join those ranks.

Infra Corporation, was acquired by EMC’s Resource Management Software Business Unit for undisclosed financial terms.

Combined with their previous acquisitions:

SMARTS – Availability & Performance Management – Q1 2005
nLayers -  IT  Resource Reconciliation (e.g., CMDB) – Q3 2006
Voyence – Configuration & Change Management (for Network Devices) – Q4 2007

This acquisition shows a slowly increasing pace of their acquisitions (within the software group).  With that being said, looking at their portfolio, I would be surprised if we don’t see another one or maybe even two (depending on the size) before the year is out.  Areas they could benefit from (aka we could see) would be Configuration & Change Management (for Systems/Applications) or a move to strengthen their Availability & Performance Management offering; specifically more application performance centric.

On the CCM front there are numerous virtual & physical system configuration vendors sprouting up these days, versus before the primary game in town was BladeLogic (or Opsware before HP acquired them).  Meanwhile, on the Performance Management front they have a variety of options that could include grabbing a smaller application performance appliance vendor (e.g., Mazu, Xangati, Packet Design)  or something bigger like maybe a NetQoS.  Or even bigger and more interesting (but convoluted) could be buying out NetIQ who continues to innovate within Attachemate (e.g., Aegis product) or the artist formerly known as Precise Software (and now again known by the same name after Symantec spun them back out).  Probably long shots but just thoughts to ponder as the EMC Resource Management Software portfolio could use portfolio expansion in either or both functional areas of the DCAB.

Bottom line from my outsiders perspective is EMC is one or two moves away from changing conversations from the big 4 to maybe the big 5.