Microsoft Acquires BlueStripe To Boost Heterogeneous Monitoring of New OMS
Microsoft today said it has acquired BlueStripe Software, a popular provider of software used to monitor the performance of infrastructure and help systems administrators track down bottlenecks at the transaction layer of applications. The companies didn't disclose terms.
While BlueStripe's performance management platform is popular among enterprises that use System Center Operations Manager, its wares appealed to IT managers for their ability to monitor events throughout the infrastructure and applications stack. The two companies only started working together a few years ago but since BlueStripe talked up the SCOM management packs they've developed, I wondered if Microsoft would swallow the company.
Microsoft said it will stop offering BlueStripe's products on a standalone basis -- the company indicated temporarily -- and will absorb the technology into the new Microsoft Operations Management Suite. OMS, announced at last month's Ignite conference, will be Microsoft's new cloud-based offering that will help manage the components of its new Azure Stack, which the company said will provide Azure-like functionality in the enterprise.
The new OMS, which will work with System Center but not require it, will also provide management of key components of an enterprise infrastructure including (presumably) VMware's virtualization and vCloud Air public cloud, Amazon Web Services and OpenStack-based clouds. BlueStripe and its team could help Microsoft further achieve that goal with OMS. BlueStripe last year developed richer ties to offer a System Center Management Pack for its FactFinder service and late last year integrated it into the Windows Azure Pack.
Despite its ties with Microsoft, BlueStripe also boasted the ability to monitor the impact of transactions in the performance of key applications such as IBM CICS and SAP R3, as well as other transaction-oriented applications running on everything from mainframes to RISC-based Unix systems and Linux-based applications.
"BlueStripe's solution helps map, monitor and troubleshoot distributed applications across heterogeneous operating systems and multiple datacenter and cloud environments. BlueStripe is commonly used today by customers to extend the value of Microsoft System Center by adding application-aware infrastructure performance monitoring," wrote Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager, enterprise cloud. "Now that we have welcomed BlueStripe employees into the Microsoft family, we will be hard at work making BlueStripe's solution an integral part of Microsoft's management products and services, like System Center and Operations Management Suite (OMS). We will discontinue selling the BlueStripe solutions in the near term while we work on these updates, although we will continue to support existing BlueStripe customers during this time."
Certainly BlueStripe's customers will wonder what this means for the future of its performance management software as a standalone offering. While that remains to be seen, Microsoft said at Ignite that so-called "solution packs" will be a key part of OMS.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/10/2015 at 1:25 PM