IBM Bolsters Storage Business With Acquisition of Software Firm

IBM did not release the purchase price for TrelliSoft, a privately held company with just 30 employees and 35 current customers.

Glen Ellyn, Ill.-based TrelliSoft will be integrated directly into IBM's Software Group, with its products immediately available from IBM's Tivoli software unit, said Robert LeBlanc, Tivoli's general manager.

TrelliSoft's storage management software, known as StorageAlert, acts as a monitoring "dashboard" for storage networks, one of the missing pieces in IBM's quiver of storage products, which already includes storage servers and other hardware, software, integration services and outsourcing of corporate data centers.

"I think it fits in rather nicely" with IBM's current business, said Forrester Research's Galen Schreck. "It's an integration opportunity for them. They'll sell you the storage, and now they're filling out their systems management and software portfolio."

As companies' electronic data piles up, the storage sector has been one of the few bright spots in computer hardware sales, growing at 20-30 percent per year in terms of storage capacity purchased, Schreck said.

A Forrester survey of the world's top 3,500 companies found that 50 percent of firms planned to add more capacity in 2002. Some 28 percent of those firms already operate so-called storage area networks, known as SANs, groups of data repository servers kept separate from the company's other computers.

Another 10 percent of companies said they would soon establish SANs, Schreck said.

IBM's competitors in the storage software arena include EMC, Computer Associates International and Hewlett-Packard.

Among those competitors, EMC is closest to offering an end-to-end product that integrates hardware with monitoring software and configuration tools across the plethora of storage operating systems and hardware, Schreck said.