Buying Time Again

IBM Corp. reported it was acquiring Platform Computing Corp., a Canadian cluster management software firm, and Q1 Labs, a security intelligence software company. Meanwhile, McAfee, Inc., a subsidiary of Intel Corp., announced it was purchasing NitroSecurity Inc., a provider of security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. Finally, Red Hat Inc. announced it was buying Gluster Inc., a maker of a proprietary cluster file system.

Focal Points:

• IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Platform Computing, which is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, for an undisclosed amount. The company is a leader in cluster and grid management software, with more than 2,000 clients worldwide and five million server processors under management. The 500-person company, which is conveniently located near IBM's Toronto Software Labs, will become part of the System Software unit. Platform has key partnerships with Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., and Red Hat, which IBM will continue to support. In addition to the customers and personnel, IBM obtains the intellectual property and software for Platform's cluster management and Symphony financial services grid software, MapReduce and the Hadoop MapReduce variant, the flagship Load Sharing Facility (LSF) for traditional HPC clusters and its Infrastructure Sharing Facility (ISF) for virtual server clouds.
• IBM also announced a definitive agreement to acquire Q1 Labs, a provider of SIEM security software, for an undisclosed price. The advantage of this software's advanced analytics and correlation capabilities is that it can automatically detect and flag actions across an enterprise that deviate from prescribed policies and typical behavior to help prevent breaches, such as an employee accessing unauthorized information. Once the deal is closed, the Waltham, MA company will join IBM's newly formed Security Systems division and Q1's CEO, Brendan Hannigan, will become the division head. The security division will also manage IBM's Tivoli, Rational and Information Management security software products, as well as the company's security appliances, lab offerings, services, and research efforts. Q1 Labs has more than 1,800 clients globally and is a nice fit for IBM, which currently monitors 12 billion security events worldwide per day for its clients, according to the company. IBM has made more than 10 security acquisitions in the past decade as well as more than 25 analytics-related purchases. IBM estimates the new division will target a $94 billion opportunity in security software and services, which has approximately a 12 percent compound annual growth rate.
• McAfee is expanding its security umbrella by acquiring NitroSecurity, a long-standing McAfee Security Innovation Alliance partner, for an undisclosed amount. McAfee intends to combine NitroSecurity technologies with its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), which will give customers a single security platform for event analysis and management. The integration expands the capability of the ePO platform to view events, activity and logs created by networks, databases and applications and to institute a range of monitoring and mitigation actions. McAfee also stated it would use the SEIM technology to expand its Risk and Compliance and Global Threat Intelligence capabilities. 
• Meanwhile, Red Hat is acquiring the privately-held Gluster, a storage company that builds management tools for controlling the growth of unstructured data in customers' own data centers and in cloud services, for $136 million. This acquisition will fill the gaps in Red Hat's storage management portfolio. Gluster offers a mix of commodity hardware and open source software, which enables enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool. The GlusterFS file system uses a no-metadata server model, based on an elastic hashing algorithm, which allows GlusterFS to scale across more than 500 x86 servers to implement a distributed network attached storage (NAS) environment, holding petabytes of data. Red Hat intends to sell GlusterFS on a subscription basis as well as integrate it into its product stacks. 

Experton Group believes IBM's acquisition of Platform Computing is a smart strategic move that will enable IBM to provide a well-integrated cloud environment that encompasses multiple servers that can span on- and off-premise data centers. The ability to construct and manage these future topologies could become a key differentiator for IBM. Additionally, the company, which has been building a loosely-knit security framework over the past few years, is taking the quantum step of creating a division to coordinate and drive its security agenda. With cyber security playing a bigger role in business and IT, IBM is gearing up to win a bigger market share of the rapidly growing market and to once again push to prove it is a one-stop shop for all IT organizations. McAfee sees the same business scenario unfolding and is moving to become the security provider that manages, monitors and mitigates key IT elements. Even though the space is consolidating,

IT executives can expect it to become more competitive and vendors more aggressive. Gluster has sought to be the Red Hat of storage and instead has morphed into the storage arm of Red Hat. Red Hat has demonstrated it can move effectively into adjacent spaces and is doing so again as it pursues its goal of exceeding $1 billion in annual revenues. The acquisition will also enable the company to move up the technology complexity stack so that more workloads can be executed on open source solutions. IT executives should pay careful attention to the transformations that are occurring in the IT markets so that IT business plans and strategies keep current with the technology trends and directions. CEOs and senior business executives expect IT to be agile and responsive to the changing business and regulatory environments; keeping IT's strategies and vision in sync with technology trends is one key component required to meet the business' goals and vision.