IBM Acquires Application-Management Vendor Cyanea Systems

IBM says it has acquired software company Cyanea Systems Corp. for an undisclosed sum. Cyanea develops software used by businesses to monitor the performance of their enterprise applications. IBM officials said Thursday that Cyanea's technology will be integrated into IBM's existing middleware apps, including those in its WebSphere, Tivoli, and Rational product lines.

Robert LeBlanc, IBM's general manager for application and integration middleware, said Cyanea's software is unique in that it lets users measure the performance of composite applications that reside across Web, midtier, and back-end servers. Cyanea gives users of such applications the ability to "drill down and understand where the performance bottleneck is," LeBlanc said during a conference call.

Analysts say the acquisition is consistent with IBM's strategy of enhancing its middleware's capability to perform the kinds of infrastructure-management tasks that often require separate applications. "IBM is not in the applications business, but they are adding more application-style functionality to their middleware," says Chris Foster, an analyst at Technology Business Research.

Earlier this month, IBM acquired Alphablox Corp., a maker of business-intelligence software, and in March it bought out Candle Corp., which develops infrastructure-management software.