IBM to acquire Cyanea

IBM today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Cyanea, a leading provider of software that monitors and manages the performance of Web-based business applications. Cyanea is a privately held company based in Oakland, California. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Upon closing, Cyanea`s operations will be integrated into IBM`s Tivoli systems management software business and its products will be available immediately from IBM.

Cyanea`s software allows business applications written in Java as well as CICS and IMS, operating across mainframe and distributed computing environments, to run faster and with less downtime.

The technology is designed to diagnose and troubleshoot problems before they affect response time. It also tracks application performance over time to help companies more intelligently plan information technology purchases and deployments.

Such capabilities are in high demand, as companies rely on advanced application management tools that are consistent across platforms and the application lifecycle.

"IBM is unmatched in providing companies with the tools they need to streamline their business processes and become more flexible and adaptive to market demands and opportunities," said Robert LeBlanc, General Manager, IBM Application and Integration Middleware Division. "Managing applications across the application lifecycle on a common architecture is a key requirement for these on-demand businesses, so the addition of Cyanea and its lifecycle management expertise is an important step for our clients."

"I am delighted that Cyanea will be joining the IBM family. The combination of Cyanea and IBM software will give customers a more comprehensive set of solutions for addressing the challenges that large enterprises face in managing heterogeneous environments and helping to ensure fail-safe performance and availability," said James Chong, president and chief executive officer of Cyanea.

The agreement to acquire Cyanea extends IBM`s product portfolio under the Tivoli brand, and complements the existing application management capabilities of IBM`s Tivoli systems management, WebSphere middleware offerings, and Rational application testing. Cyanea technology will be integrated into IBM`s middleware portfolio of offerings in several key areas including:

* Tivoli - Cyanea will greatly enhance end-to-end business transaction monitoring capabilities, zSeries performance and application monitoring capabilities.

* WebSphere - Cyanea will help ensure the success of WebSphere-based implementations by providing troubleshooting capabilities throughout the application lifecycle for areas such as memory management and transaction problems.

* Rational - Cyanea capabilities will help Rational provide deeper application performance analysis capabilities to WebSphere developers, both for distributed and host-based WebSphere instances.

Cyanea`s customers include global financial services firms, insurance companies, retailers, healthcare firms, government agencies, manufacturers and distributors.