IBM’s Enterprise Software Acquisition Spree
Oracle gets all the media attention, but IBM has been quietly buying up enterprise software companies. They have bought the following software companies in the last 2 years:
Isogon, software asset management solutions.
Micromuse, Ascential & Cyanea, performance management solutions of web-based business apps.
DWL, Customer Data Integration (CDI) Middleware.
Collation, IT service management software.
Bowstreet, portal technologies. Analysis & discussions here.
Datapower, message-aware networking. Read analysis from Burnham’s Beat. This acquisition has more nuances.
CIMS Labs, virtualization of computing resources.
BuildForge, Compliance software.
There are others.
Then, yesterday, it announced the acquisition of Webify, an SOA player. Today, they acquired MRO for $740 Million.
The trend indicates that IBM is building an IT infrastructure software porfolio by acquisition, and while it was avoiding the business application space so far, today’s acquisition of MRO is a vertical application acquisition.
So what is the strategy going forward? More infrastructure software, or diversify into application software as well?
nice roundup. here is my take on the MRO deal, if you’re interested:
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/002017.html
Thanks, James. This is a GREAT review of the MRO acquisition. Please feel free to elaborate on Webify and the others as well. I like IBM’s portfolio of Service Management Infrastructure software that has now come together.
Sramana
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It seems to me that we have acquired a lot Infrastructutre tools and other app. sw in the web domain, but how we are doing using them or integrating them when we build a sloution for ourselves (Interal Business App) or for customers as part of our propsal. I do a lot of Proposal review but I dont see a quick adoption of the assets we have acquired.