Tivoli’s acquisition of device management vendor BigFix helps fix a hole that Tivoli’s had for sometime: managing the software on all those little “end-points” outside of the data center. IBM’s Tivoli portfolio is known for managing servers and other “big” aspects in the data center. Of course, their offerings and services scope all the way up to managing the processes that IT uses in its daily job – in addition to monitoring and managing infrastructure.

Managing “End-Points”

Tivoli hasn’t had the most stellar reputation when it comes to desktop management: computers and devices used by employees. BigFix built its reputation in doing just this and has been extending into both the “enterprise”/server area and mobile. Hence, you’ll hear the term “end-point” mentioned in this context more than a specific device. There’s just too many “computers” hooked up to corporate networks now-a-days to list them: desktops, laptops (including Macs, which is new), smart phones, and other “it’s really just a small computer” type devices.

Much of the focus here is one some classic enterprise-y desires: compliance, security, and asset management/discovery. The first two tend to boil down to “make sure devices don’t run rouge software that can get the company in trouble” while the second revolves around the difficult task of keeping track of thousands of devices spread globally attached to the corporate network.

SaaS Angle – “BigFix Live”?

BigFix has been involved in some SaaS (or “SaaS-style” as they put i) scenarios of late, mostly selling their platform for use by managed service providers like BT and Mitsubishi. IBM has been looking towards SaaS to (once again) have a go at selling to the mid-market with it’s Tivoli Live offering (interview and demo, initial coverage), a SaaS hosted version of Tivoli monitoring and reporting.

Through Twitter (and thanks to IBM AR for picking it up) I ended up asking what the SaaS plans were for BigFix. Tivoli’s head, Al Zollar, said there was no specific announcement right now, but that there’d be more on how BigFix fits in there in the future, esp. as relates to working with managed service providers.

Overall

I must admit, I haven’t really followed BigFix extremely closely, but even from my shallow coverage I know they have a good reputation. From what I’m seeing, it looks like a nice fill-in buy for Tivoli.

More

• Chris Kanaracus reports on the news with a quote from myself.
• Bloomberg reports that the “undisclosed sum” could be around $400M.

Disclosure: IBM is a client.

While at Sun’s Menlo Park campus recently, I had the chance to talk with Sun’s Tim Cramer:

Developing OpenSolaris & New Features in 11.08

We first talked with each other about the development process of OpenSolaris and went over some feature highlights for the 11.08 release:

OpenSolaris 11.08 Demo

Then, Tim showed us a quick demo of some of the more interesting new features in OpenSolaris 11.08:

Disclosure: Sun is a client and sponsored these videos.