On 23 October 2009, BMC Software acquired a small, privately held U.K.-based IT service dependency mapping (DM) vendor, Tideway Systems, and its solution Foundation Discovery. BMC will retain Tideway's approximately 70 employees. BMC has not disclosed the acquisition price.

Tideway was the last stand-alone IT service DM vendor. Beginning in 2004, all of the other vendors in this space were acquired by larger companies, such as CA, HP/Mercury, IBM and EMC. As a small, privately held company, Tideway was nimble in developing key enhancements in scalability and virtualization, and was unusually responsive to the requirements of its customers. BMC will be challenged to continue developing the innovative functionality for which Tideway became known.

Despite recent enhancements BMC has made to its discovery product set, the company recognized that its IT service DM capabilities were not competitively robust. The Tideway acquisition is intended to enhance those functions. Gartner views this deal as positive news for BMC's large Atrium configuration management database (CMDB) installed base and its prospective customers. Assimilating Tideway technology will likely:

• Broaden Atrium's appeal beyond IT-service-management-oriented buyers. With an enhanced IT service DM solution, it can target the growing number of CMDB buyers that use IT service modeling for data center projects (such as consolidation, compliance, disaster recovery management and business continuity planning).
• Enable BMC to better compete with vendors like HP that offer strong DM solutions in addition to their CMDBs.
• Motivate CA and IBM to step up the pace of innovation on their DM tools to prevent BMC (and HP) from leading in both the CMDB and DM markets.

Tideway's Foundation v.7.3 will become a core component of the Atrium brand, and will serve as the basis for BMC's discovery suite and dependency tool, Application Dependency Discovery Manager (ADDM; formerly known as Topology Discovery). The new platform, ADDM v.8.0, will support mainframe, network and virtualization, as well as applications like Java EE, SAP and Exchange.

Tideway's previously developed integration with Atrium will enable BMC to "productize" the adapter as early as November 2009. This deal will temporarily increase BMC's inventory solutions from three to four. Complete convergence of the current ADDM solution and Tideway should occur during 3Q10, and will require current ADDM customers to migrate to v.8.2. But the greatest challenge BMC faces is building further integration to its other products.

• BMC customers: If you use ADDM and are under maintenance, expect BMC to offer a no-cost migration; however, expect services costs for the migration. If you are using Atrium but have not acquired an IT service DM tool, evaluate Tideway.
• Tideway customers: If you use Tideway as a DM solution for a CMDB other than Atrium, continue using the product, but recognize that BMC may not maintain the adapter for future versions.

• "IT Service View CMDB Vendor Landscape, 2009"— The slowly evolving IT service view CMDB tool market will pick up its pace as implementations increase and product differentiation and new functionality releases accelerate. By Ronni Colville and Patricia Adams
• "Selection Criteria for IT Service Dependency Mapping Vendors"— Since the acquisition of most of the small, specialized, IT service DM tool vendors, innovation of this technology has slowed and it now mostly used to jump-start CMDB initiatives. By Patricia Adams and Ronni Colville

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