(Source: Business Wire)BMC Software (NYSE:BMC) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited (Tideway), a leading provider of IT discovery solutions. The acquisition will enhance BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.

"BMC acquiring Tideway is great news for us. We selected Tideway Foundation as the best of breed IT discovery tool and the BMC Atrium CMDB as the best of breed configuration management database," said Linda Moreira, program director of data center moves at Standard Bank, one of Africa's largest financial services groups. "Both solutions are already providing significant value, supporting a major data center migration project and our IT Service Management initiative. The acquisition should bring the benefit of rock-solid integration between discovery and the CMDB."

The new offering supports the complete set of discovery requirements for BSM and features deep integration with BMC's Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) based on Tideway's long-time membership in BMC's Technology Alliance Partner program. This presents customers an in-depth understanding of the relationships and dependencies of their physical assets and applications not currently available from any other vendor.

"The CMDB is most powerful when it has a clear understanding of infrastructure components, application dependencies and service relationships," said Ronni Colville, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner, Inc. "Essential to that are solutions that automatically discover, model and maintain those relationships despite ongoing infrastructure changes. This information can empower IT organizations to make more timely and accurate change and configuration decisions and deliver better service to the business."

The addition of Tideway technology provides BMC customers with the industry's largest open library of predefined IT configuration discovery patterns. These patterns provide out of the box descriptions of software and hardware resources that allow IT organizations to automatically identify and characterize their environment and map related application dependencies and services.

When combined with the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) solution, BMC will deliver unmatched visibility into the data center and rapidly reduce the time and resources required to model, manage and maintain applications and services.