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A Solid BSM for SMB Play?

in BSM4SMB, Business Service Management, dashboard, E2E Service Management, M&A, Quest Software, Service Management

Quest Software announced their intentions to acquire Business Service Management vendor Magnum Technologies today.

I’m not sure of how much penetration Quest has ever gotten into the larger enterprise accounts with their full Foglight solution, but they have had broader success across the board with their various point tools for databases/applications, Java and Windows. Foglight (and it’s counterpart Big Brother) and the Spotlight products/plugins play firmly into the IT organization silos. They’ve got some great diagnostics capabilities and very “geek” oriented dashboards for managing, tweeking and tuning databases and applications. I’ve never seen too much of a top down, business oriented, non-IT focus other than messaging from Quest’s Foglight line in what I’d say was a true Business Service Mangement manner like other vendors have today. In my past, I helped break in Foglight 4 into an environment with upwards of 2000+ servers and hundreds of services/processes/transactions and it wasn’t a painless process. Foglight 5 is out now and at least looks like they’ve done some of the things they talked about in roadmap sessions I was familiar with in 2004-05. I am not sure how the backend architecture changed which was where all the problems existed for large deployments. A great product for environments with a few hundred servers!

It looks like the Magnum acquisition could be what Quest needs to get a real business and top down story in place and to broaden out from the pure play systems and application management space. If they play their cards right, having purpose built Business Service Management plays that are in line with Quest’s strengths that visibility into systems/application/databases, Java and Windows and SMART pricing/packaging could be very attractive for the SMB market. I know little about Magum’s Business Service Management solution and do not know anyone who uses it. I do know IBM Tivoli OEM’s some of their network discovery technology in the IBM Tivoli Netview family. More emphasis on network monitoring and management would also be a plus for Quest as well. They could easily take on share from the likes of the What’s Up Gold, Solarwinds and Open Source Software folks if they can find a way to “unify” the IT organization silos into a single vendor/solution strategy.

Should be interesting to follow the integration messaging!

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  • Hi Doug:

    You have a nice write up here regarding the announced acquisition of Magnum Technologies.

    I’m in product management at Quest. Thought we’d provide some additional clarification and insights for the areas that you mentioned.

    1) The acquisition of Magnum Technologies is a closed deal. So, while we announced our intentions, we’ve also already followed up on them šŸ™‚

    2) Magnum enables Quest to offer IT organizations the ability to measure the impact of change on the business. Magnum adds in real time component discovery, a robust third party integrations mechanism for inclusion in SLA calculation, network monitoring / management, SLA calculation and compliance based upon scheduling windows, role, type of architecture, and numerous other factors, a CMDB, and so on.

    3) Magnum has over 300 existing total customers for their software products. Quest and Magnum have had a reseller relationship for about 6 months that had us already doing joint engineering, sales and implementations. There are accounts that have jointly deployed both solutions.

    4) Foglight 5, did go GA for Quest in Q1. Foglight 5 applies a different approach to performance management, by incorporating a discovery and model management engine at its core. This means that data collected from any agent is always stored in relation to model instances, that live in relationships with other model instances. Models are created, discovered, nad updated in real time as the sytsem operates. Model management enables the real time calculation of event dependencies and easier representations of real world processes, such as “My Toronto Servers” or “My BPEL Process”. The data in the system is always correlated due to its association to the representation.

    5) Over time, the CMDB of Magnum and the model management runtime core of Foglight 5 will be merged into a single repository solution.

    6) Our BSM vision goes into two paths: a) robust collection of performance, availability, quality, service desk metrics into the calculation of SLAs in real time. With the robust set of products that Quest has among applications, databases, and Windows, we have a number of a mechanisms to get access to data and events that can make SLA calculation more robust. b) Take advantage of our model management core to represent native artifacts more naturally. This would mean creating services and SLAs around BPEL processes or process represnetations carried in third party products.

    7) The acquisition of Magnum and the inclusion of its portfolio into our systems management strategy is going to make it easier for Quest to make databases, applications and Windows platforms strategy to IT and to the business. We can show the impact of change on those systems. This will allow us to sell broader, higher, and more strategically in accounts. This also allows us to more rapidly bring together our portfolio of products into an integrated solution, which is a common request of our customer base.

    We can follow up with additional details, if you’d like.

    Thanks,
    Tyler Jewell
    PM, Quest

  • Thanks for the informative update Tyler. (I don’t recall ever working with you in my past relationships with Quest from 2003-05, have you been there long?) I certainly appreciate your openness as a vendor and product manager – a trait not normally seen in product management types without an NDA! šŸ™‚ I know my readers around the world appreciate it was well.

    I’m all about Business Service Management here and would be very interested in hearing more about the product and your approach to Business Service Management. It sounds like some of those Foglight enhancements I was preaching to Quest were taken to heart!

    I look forward to hearing more from you and seeing things develop over time!

    Doug

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