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Microsoft on Wednesday said it acquired AssetMetrix, an Ottawa-based software asset management (SAM) company.
The deal, unveiled at Microsoft’s annual management summit in San Diego, will enable the software giant to enter the SAM market faster than if it developed a solution in-house, said Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows and Enterprise Management Division. Though the acquisition comes as good news for some partners, it’s bad news for Microsoft SAM partners, many of them former large account resellers (LARs).
Microsoft plans to deliver a company-branded SAM solution, integrated with its Systems Management Server (SMS), in the next six to nine months, Tatarinov said.
"It is a true business need and a missing piece in the overall systems management strategy," Tatarinov said after announcing the acquisition in a keynote speech at the summit Wednesday. "This is the fastest way for us to get to market and add this to SMS. It's the fastest path to market because it will take just six to nine months to get it all integrated.”
Microsoft's SAM would go up against Symantec's LiveState, Novell's ZenWorks and Altiris.
AssetMetrix has developed "deep expertise" to help customers and service providers discover actual inventory of software and technical "artifacts" on the desktop and servers and provide better advice on using those assets, Tatarinov said. It also will help customers with their license compliance needs and enable them to find untapped software assets they may have paid for but aren’t using.
The acquisition is a good move for Microsoft, said Frederic Esnouf, delivery manager at PI Services, a Paris-based Microsoft solution provider, after the keynote. "It's a good option for the enterprise," he said. "They don’t want to have to pay someone to find out if the software they've already paid for from Microsoft is paid for."
Microsoft's current SMS offers some software inventory and asset discovery capabilities, but it's difficult for customers to extract data, according to industry observers.
Tatarinov said the AssetMetrix solution manages a database of 300,000 known applications and Web services.
The SAM technology will help drive sales for Microsoft resellers and potentially assist hosting partners, but it's unclear if Microsoft plans to offer its own hosted SAM service, observers said.
On stage, a Microsoft product manager demonstrated the integration of AssetMetrix's platform with SMS and said that having such a system would enable customers to enter their credit card, buy and get compliant. But Tatarinov jumped in to qualm any concerns about that scenario. "We are not that evil," he kidded.
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