BMC to buy Identify for application troubleshooting

BMC's next acquisition promises firms better tools to identify application problems and manage service-oriented architecture (SOA)

Business service management (BSM) and helpdesk software vendor BMC yesterday announced it is to spend $150m to acquire application problem-resolution specialist Identify Software in a deal designed to help customers reduce infrastructure maintenance costs and better manage service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments.

Jonathan Priestley, director of corporate strategy and business planning at BMC, said Israel-based Identify offers a "black box" recorder software system for firms' IT infrastructure to record detailed information about application transactions.

This data can then be used to help IT staff more quickly identify the root cause of failed transactions and application problems, Priestley said.

"Identify helps firms find out where a problem occurred and what was happening with the application and the surrounding infrastructure when it happened," Priestley added. "The business benefit therefore comes in reducing the large amount of money firms spend trying to find the root cause of problems within complex infrastructures."

BMC plans to integrate the technology with its own transaction management system, which it launched in February, and Priestley predicts few problems. " The software is already integrated with our service-desk products and there is no overlap with our transaction management solution so integration should be relatively easy," he said.

Priestley predicted that demand for transaction management software is set to increase as more firms roll out service oriented architectures (SOAs) that build applications from reusable components and therefore rely on large numbers of complex data transactions.

"When you think about web services and SOAs they rely on loosely integrated components, so the need to spot potential problems in those integration points becomes even more important," said Priestley.