BMC buys Neptuny Software

October 6, 2010 Off By David
Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Joab Jackson.

Business service management software provider BMC has acquired the software business of Neptuny Software, a provider of capacity management and IT performance optimisation software, the companies announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

BMC will fold Neptuny’s Caplan line of capacity management software into its own BSM portfolio and cloud management offerings. Neptuny’s Consulting Services business unit was not included in the purchase. That unit has been re-established as an independent company under the new brand Moviri.

"The pinpoint accuracy of Neptuny’s capacity management tool allows organizations to precisely match their capacity with their specific application needs, and eliminate unnecessary investments in hardware," said BMC chief technology officer Kia Behnia.

Neptuny’s software translates typical data center performance metrics, such as CPU utilisation, into the language of business unit readiness. This could allow organisations to better plan their capacity needs for their business processes. Especially as organisation use more virtualisation, such planning will become instrumental to effective use of IT, BMC predicts.

"This acquisition strengthens BMC’s Capacity Management portfolio at a time when more and more organisations are looking for sophisticated capacity planning insights that take business and application performance into account as well as infrastructure analysis," noted Mary Johnston Turner, IDC research director for enterprise systems management. The software will be particularly useful for distributed systems and cloud optimisation, which up to now BMC has supported with a combination of BMC and partner-owned software.

Neptuny’s software covers a wide range of data centre conditions such as compute, network, storage, power, cooling performance. In addition to capacity management software, the company also had a line of virtualisation management and accounting and chargeback software.

Overall, this purchase is a "positive" for BMC, said Milind Govekar, a research vice president with Gartner Research who focuses on IT operations management. BMC’s own distributed systems products "lacked breadth, and are sometimes perceived as difficult to use and deploy," he noted. Gartner expects that BMC will continue to invest in Caplan and support the Italian development team. Customers using BMC’s own tools in an distributed systems environment should ask BMC for an integration roadmap, and should it be necessary ask for a licence swap to use Caplan.

Neptuny has approximately 30 active Caplan software customers, IDC has estimated. Neptuny counted among its users organisations such as Accenture, Computer Sciences Corporation, Deutsche Bank, Expedia and Vodafone. In its last fiscal year, ending June 30, 2010, BMC reported revenue of $1.92 billion.