IBM Snaps Up Management Software Venture

The vendor said Thursday it has acquired Cyanea Systems, an Oakland, Calif.-based maker of software that monitors and manages Web-based business application performance.

IBM was one of Cyanea's investors and most of Cyanea's products were sold through IBM. Terms of the deal were not disclosed because Cyanea was a privately held company.

Cyanea's technology improves the way IBM's Tivoli systems management platform performs with applications written in Java, CICS (Customer Information Control System) and IMS--IBM's transactional and hierarchical database management system for e-business applications. IBM will quickly integrate Cyanea's tools into Tivoli to realize such advantages, said Dave Caddis, director of Tivoli strategy, Armonk, N.Y.

Fortifying Tivoli with Cyanea's technology will be a significant step in creating a common lexicon between various parts of a Tivoli-managed network dealing with application problems related to Java, CICS and IMS, Caddis said.

Enterprises that internally manage CICS but have Java applications being managed by an application group outside the data center will face less confusion when trying to pinpoint the source of a performance problem, he said.

"In many cases like this, a problem will come into the help desk and the next thing you know there are 11 people trying to figure out what part of the environment the problem is in--not even diagnosing the problem yet," Caddis said. "[Cyanea] will put this all in context for Tivoli."