NetIQ Partners With Infravio, Enters Web Service Management Market

The deal, announced at NetIQ's NetConnect 2004 user conference in Orlando, Fla., also includes joint sales and marketing by the two companies. Financial details were not released.

In addition, San Jose, Calif.-based, NetIQ said it would act as lead investor in privately held Infravio's latest round of financing. Other investors include Walden International and Crystal Internet Ventures. Terms of the agreements were not disclosed.

NetIQ is a midsize player that's much larger than a startup, but much smaller than Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other major companies in the systems management space. Following increasing annual losses from fiscal years 1999 to 2002, the company reduced the red ink by more than half in 2003 to $339.6 million from $733.5 million the previous year.

Revenues, on the other hand, have increased steadily during the same time period. In fiscal 2003, the company reported $310.2 million in revenues, compared to $278.2 million the previous year. In the second quarter of fiscal 2004, NetIQ had a net loss of $10.3 million on revenues of $64 million.

Financial condition aside, NetIQ has a healthy number of global 2000 companies as customers, and is entering the web services management market soon enough to carve out a niche before major vendors takeover, Jason Bloomberg, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said. Infravio, based in Cupertino, Calif., is a client of ZapThink.

"They have the ability to be a bit more agile than larger players," Bloomberg said of NetIQ. "If you look at HP, for instance, they're taking quite a bit of time to roll out real web services management capabilities (in OpenView). NetIQ, with the Infravio partnership, will likely be able to roll out competitive products in the next few months."

Indeed, the first NetIQ software products incorporating Infravio technology are scheduled to be generally available in the fall. The two new products are expected to be able to manage web services running on Microsoft's .Net environment and its rival Java 2 enterprise platform built by Sun Microsystems and its industry allies in the Java world.

AppManager users will be able to manage web services through the same console currently used to manage Windows, Linux and Unix environments, NetIQ officials said.

Web services is an umbrella term for a set of emerging standards, based on extensible markup language, for integrating applications distributed across the Internet. Technology under development include security, management, orchestration and more. The latter refers to coordinating message traffic among multiple systems.

this story courtesy of TechWeb .