In March VMware acquired a number of products from its parent company EMC for $200M, all parts of the Ionix infrastructure management portfolio, and all coming from acquisitions of small technology firms happened between 2006 and 2009.
Now VMware is rebranding the products and adding them to its already wide product portfolio:
- Server Configuration Manager (acquired from Configuresoft in June 2009) is now vCenter Configuration Manager
- Application Discovery Manager (acquired from nLayers in June 2006) is now vCenter Application Discovery Manager
- Service Manager (acquired from Infra in March 2008) kept the same name
The most important piece of the new offering clearly is the last one of the list: the configuration management database (CMDB) that VMware needs to transition from a virtualization firm to a fully featured infrastructure management firm able to compete against BMC, CA, HP and IBM for the control of the physical layer.
About this point, it’s extremely interesting that VMware didn’t include the term vCenter in the rebrand, as it did for all other datacenter products. The name VMware Service Manager seems to imply that the product is not just about the virtual domain.
Another two products have been transferred to VMware in March, both coming from the EMC acquisition of FastScale in August 2009: Virtual Manager and Composer.
Apparently, none of them are part of this rebranding operation and it’s not clear how and when VMware will reintroduce them.
A last product that has been included in the company’s portfolio instead is the Hyperic management suite, which VMware inherited after the acquisition of SpringSource in August 2009.
Overall, the company’s offering is becoming extremely complex. At least another two brand new product is expected to be launched this year: the vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly project Redwood), scheduled for September.
The impressive growth of its portfolio will represent a significant challenge in terms of integration for the company.