EMC, BMC Bond Over Software

The software news from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) keeps on coming: Just a day after announcing its intentions to acquire Documentum Inc. in a deal worth an estimated $1.7 billion, the storage giant said today that it will tighten its partnership with management software vendor BMC Software Inc. (NYSE: BMC) (see BMC Names EMC Its Storage Partner and EMC Cops Documentum).

As an extension of their existing partnership -- which the two companies entered into in July when EMC purchased the rights to BMCs Patrol Storage Manager software -- BMC said today that it has named EMC the "Foundation Partner" for its Software Business Service Management (BSM) initiative (see EMC Chews & Swallows BMC Unit).

So what does that mean, you may ask? Primarily, the companies said, they are working together to tightly integrate the EMC ControlCenter (ECC) storage management software with BMC’s Patrol software for managing IT infrastructures.

The announcement should come as no great surprise. EMC and BMC said this summer that they would work on integrating their technologies, and that BMC would start reselling EMC’s ControlCenter products.

Still, Dan Hoffman, BMC’s director of storage solutions, claims that today’s announcement is an important one. “We wanted to show that this integration is reality, and that it’s not just slideware,” he says. “Integration is possible and has been demonstrated.”Enterprise Storage Group Inc. analyst Peter Gerr says that today’s announcement could be EMC’s way of reassuring BMC that their partnership is just as important as EMC's planned large-scale acquisitions of Documentum and Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) (see EMC Gobbles Legato). “Some may have felt that BMC would take a backseat,” he says. “This looks like a good relationship-building announcement.”

In addition, Gerr says, today’s announcement, along with yesterday’s news of the Documentum acquisition, is further evidence that EMC is committed to developing an information lifecycle management (ILM) solution -- the ability to automatically move data from one type of storage to another as its value and importance to the company shifts over time. “This certainly supports EMC’s stated intention of deploying an ILM solution,” he says, but adds that EMC, like everyone else in the industry, is still far from having all the pieces it needs to offer ILM.

But while all of EMC’s recent software buys and partnerships seem to be part of a calculated strategy, critics say that the company may have bitten off more than it can chew. “When a company’s making these massive buyouts, you know they’re going to be slower at integrating and introducing new features,” says Marco Coulter, VP of Computer Associates International Inc. (CA)'s (NYSE: CA) BrightStor Solutions.

Gerr agrees that EMC may have trouble getting its new products integrated and off the ground. “There’s a real possibility that they will stumble,” he says. “EMC doesn’t have a very successful track record of integration... Of course, that doesn’t mean they can’t do it.”

EMC and BMC, however, say they’ve already completed the first phase of the partnership, which entails giving Patrol and EMC ControlCenter customers a single, active view of their entire IT infrastructures, including their storage environments. The software pals at some point intend to provide additional integration of ECC and BMC’s IT Service Management (ITSM) suite of products, as well as its Service Impact Manager software. This, they claim, will help more closely tie storage assets with other business processes.Another question following today’s announcement is why BMC decided to kill off its own storage software, if it intended to integrate storage management into its overall business service strategy (see BMC Folds Storage Unit). While the company isn’t partnering to integrate its remaining Patrol software products with its former Patrol Storage Manager -- EMC discontinued the product and moved all of its customers over to its ControlCenter platform -- EMC’s storage software is similar to what once was an integral part of BMC’s portfolio.

“The decision was based purely on resources,” Hoffman says. “We had a fine [storage software] product, but we decided to focus on areas that we could excel in.”

— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch