uXcomm Takes On Virtualization with Acquisition

uXcomm, known mostly as a systems management provider, is preparing to offer its customers asset and capacity management tools for virtual environments.

On April 2, the Beaverton, Ore., company is announcing that it has purchased the assets of Virtugo Software, a small San Francisco company that has been developing management tools for virtual environments since 2005.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Earl Hines, director of marketing and business development at uXcomm, said that his company would keep most, but not all, of Virtugo's employees.

uXcomm is known as a systems management provider. In October, the company released the latest version of its XManage offering, which brings disparate systems and systems management software onto a common platform. This helps close the gap between the innumerable systems management software offered from the likes of CA, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

uXcomm also now offers the ability to interconnect various management products through its own SOMA (service-oriented management architecture).

With its acquisition of Virtugo's technology and its VirtualSuite software, uXcomm will now be able to offer those same types of services within virtual environments. This suite allows for the monitoring of virtual platforms, the ability to analyze virtual machine performance and give administrators tools to forecast and reallocate capacity within these environments.

"uXcomm has a long history of providing scalable systems management products for servers and network appliances, and Virtugo has successfully sold advanced virtualization management technologies that help data center managers get the best possible performance out of their infrastructure," wrote Chris Dickson, a vice president at Virtugo, in an e-mail to eWEEK.

"We are thrilled to be joining uXcomm and believe that the new combined company will benefit our combined customers greatly as they proliferate virtualization throughout their data centers," Dickson said.

uXcomm's Hines believes that this ability to monitor both the physical and virtual assets within the data center has untapped potential. As virtualization continues to grow within data centers both physical and virtual sprawl will increase and administrators will need tools to monitor both assets and capacity, Hines added.

"Performance and asset management is a very wide open space," Hines said. "There are very few players in this field who can offer management abilities across all the various virtualization technologies."

With the acquisition of Virtugo, Hines said the company plans to offer unified virtual and physical management tools that will work regardless of the technology.

VirtualSuite software works as a measurement, reporting and optimization tool with VMware's virtualization technology. Hines said that VMware's channel partners already sell VirtualSuite with the ESX Sever software.

VirtualSuite can also interconnect to Microsoft's MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) framework. In the future, uXcomm will add support for Microsoft VirtualServer, which will complement the support it already has for VMware, as well as adding support for the Xen open-source hypervisor technology.

Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International