BMC Software is acquiring MQ Software, a Minneapolis-based middleware and application management software supplier. No price for the privately held company was disclosed. It has about 300 customers.

Middleware and application management has become an increasingly competitive arena, and BMC is making the purchase to strengthen itself in an area where it has been losing out to competitors, a Gartner analyst said in a comment on the Aug. 10 acquisition.

BMC has gotten stronger in data center automation and change management database products, but at the same time it has slipped in recent years in application management tools. Its Mainview and Performance Manager products have been fallen behind IBM's Tivoli Omegamon when it comes to managing applications running with IBM WebSphere suites, according to Gartner analyst Milind Govekar.

"During the past five years, BMC Software has lost 'mind share' in the application management tools area... The MQSoftware buy provides BMC with credible and proven technology to defend its installed base in this area," he said. Govekar added that BMC customers should consider migrating from existing BMC products to MQSoftware's Q Pasa and Q Nami, "which are superior enterprise-wide products."

Q Pasa and Q Nami are mainframe middleware and application monitoring products that can monitor IBM's WebSphere, WebSphereMQ and third party supplier, Tibco's, products. Q Nami can also monitor distributed transactions and trace the topology of a distributed application.

"Q Nami can monitor composite application transactions and service-oriented archuitecture transactions across a heterogeneous computing environment," wrote Govekar.

BMC and MQSoftware were already partners and integration between MQSoftware's products and BMC's Mainview console is already in place, said Bill Miller, president of BMC's Mainframe Service Management unit.

The acquisition will give BMC an improved monitoring tool for WebSphereMQ, the former MQ Series or messaging middleware connecting dissimilar applications. WebSphereMQ is in use by 92% of large IT organizations, according to a BMC survey.

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