EMC is to acquire the rights to BMC Software's Patrol
Storage Manager, taking over support for users of the defunct
product, as well as offering a transition for BMC customers to
EMC's Control Center storage resource management
software.
EMC also hopes to provide tighter integration with BMC's other
systems management software through a technology partnership which
allows BMC to resell the Control Center software, a deal that could
give EMC as many as 5,000 new clients. The companies declined to
say how much the deal is worth.
Steve Kenniston, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, said
BMC made a good choice in partnering with EMC because the
company would not have to worry about competition on the
application server market as it would have with potential partners
IBM or Hewlett-Packard. "This way they get to work strictly with
storage," he said.
Don Langeberg, director of marketing for storage software at HP,
said his company considered buying Patrol Storage Manager but di
not see any added value from such a deal.
EMC also expected to achieve tighter integration with BMC's
flagship Patrol Systems Management software, said Barry Ader,
director of software product marketing at EMC.
BMC announced in February that it was halting further
development of open-systems storage management products, leaving
about 130 customers looking for new suppliers. BMC's director of
enterprise storage management, Dan Hoffmann, said only about 50
customers are now using Patrol Storage Manager.
Although BMC still sells storage management software for
mainframe systems, it said economic pressures forced it to pull out
of the open-systems market so it could spend resources on other
product lines. It is ranked fourth in sales of storage management
software behind IBM, EMC and Computer Associates International.
Ader said EMC will evaluate Patrol Storage Manager and,
possibly, incorporate some of the application interfaces into its
own storage resource management software. For example, BMC's
software supports Microsoft Exchange and Siebel environments, while
EMC's Control Center product does not.
"I don't think we can make any commitment to use the code," Ader
said.
Lucas Mearian writes for Computerworld