Novell To Buy Managed Objects, Expand Data Center OfferingsNovell To Buy Managed Objects, Expand Data Center Offerings

Novell is acquiring the business service management supplier Managed Objects for an undisclosed amount. It will use Managed Objects' products to expand Novell's systems management product line.

Managed Objects produces such software products as Application Impact Management, which gathers application operational data together into a management dashboard; Service Catalogue, which consolidates information about services, and manages them through review, change, and approval process workflows; CMDB 360, a configuration management database; and Application Dependency Mapping, linking application workloads to servers and their supporting components, such as databases.

Novell has been seeking to broaden its product line into physical and virtual machine management through its Zenworks Orchestrator and Zenworks Virtual Machine Management products, introduced in mid-2007.

"Novell is a natural home for Managed Objects. Our products are entirely complementary," said Siki Giunta, president of the company, in a statement announcing the acquisition.

Earlier this year, Novell invested $205 million in acquiring Toronto startup PlateSpin, which produces software for VM backup and recovery. PlateSpin also profiles the application workloads of physical servers, rates them as candidates for virtualization, and performs a physical to virtual migration, when needed.

Novell is seeking to provide "a single view" of application workloads in the data center, whether physical or virtual, and give IT managers the capability of responding to workload issues in the context of the rules of their business, said Joe Wagner, Novell's senior VP of systems and resource management, in a statement.

Novell's chief marketing officer, John Dragoon, told Information Week in February that Novell was becoming a supplier of software for "complete workload life-cycle management," able to provision a server, move the workload to another server or into a virtual machine, and provide disaster recovery and backup.