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BMC Bulks Up DBMS Portfolio With GridApp Acquisition

With its acquisition of GridApp Systems, BMC Software is expanding its portfolio of application, server, network and client configuration management to include database automation. BMC says the addition of GridApp's automated database provisioning, patching and administration capabilities will enable it to offer full-stack, end-to-end enterprise application deployment and management.

Terms for acquiring the privately held GridApp were not announced. BMC's revenue for the four fiscal quarters ending September 30 was approximately $1.96 billion. The two companies have been working together "loosely" for the last four years, but the timing was right to take the relationship to the next level, says BMC. BMC saw how enterprise customers were struggling to deal with the provisioning and configuring of databases, which are both manually intensive and soak up highly paid resources.Also, the technology silo around databases was ripe for automation, says BMC.

But automation was only part of the reason that the deal, six months in the making, was done. BMC says databases have increasingly become shared resources, and with the transition to the cloud, customers were demanding more flexible solutions. GridApp may be small, but it is a leader in this category and has a lot of Fortune 100 customers, says BMC.

Donna Scott, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, says that the BMC-GridApp relationship was opportunistic in the past. Now that is is formal, she adds, BMC will integrate GridApp into many of its products, including Cloud Lifecycle Management (to add DBMS provisioning). 

In a recent Gartner report analyzing BMC ("SWOT: BMC Software, IT Operations Management, Worldwide"), analysts Rene Millman and Debra Curtis state that the company is among the top four IT operations management vendors (along with IBM, HP and CA), and is the largest vendor in the database management system (DBMS) and asset management software markets. They say that while BMC was late to the virtualization management game, it has very good foundational technologies, especially its service request catalog and BladeLogic provisioning software, that will help as BMC move into the management of cloud environments.

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