News

IBM Cyanea buy boosts Tivoli

• By Rich Seeley
• July 29, 2004

IBM announced Thursday (7/29) that it has agreed to acquire Cyanea, an Oakland, Calif.-based privately held company founded in 2001 that specializes in application monitoring and management software. IBM is not disclosing details of the transaction or financial terms.

Cyanea’s technology will be integrated into IBM’s Tivoli systems management software products, Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware Division, told reporters in a conference call. Along with products from IBM’s recent acquisition of Candle, the Cyanea software allows Tivoli to provide comprehensive management of composite business applications, he said.

“There is a growing customer requirement for tools to manage composite applications,” LeBlanc said. “Most tools don’t provide the drill-down capabilities needed.”

He said the combination of the products developed by Tivoli and the technologies acquired from Candle and Cyanea allow IBM to offer customers “tools on a common infrastructure that really address application management.”

The software developed by Cyanea isolates and determines where performance problems are occurring in distributed applications, said James Chong, president and chief executive officer at Cyanea, who is joining IBM.

Chong said his research and development work set out to fill a gap he found in resource management tools, which he said do not isolate the problem to a specific application or provide a determination as to what exactly is going wrong.

“Cyanea views problems from the application point of view,” Chong said. “It puts the problem in an application context.”

By pinpointing the problem in an application, it is easier to prevent bottlenecks throughout the application life cycle from development through maintenance, he noted.

The Cyanea software works with Java, CICS and IMS business applications running across mainframe and distributed computing environments, according to IBM. IBM’s LeBlanc said that beyond Tivoli, the Cyanea technology will also be integrated into IBM’s Rational and WebSphere products.

IBM and Cyanea had not been strangers prior to the acquisition announcement. LeBlanc said the two companies had been working in partnership almost since Cyanea’s inception. Chong said that all 75 employees from his company will be joining IBM.