EMC Acquires Watch4net, Adds Performance Management To Cloud

EMC on Thursday said it acquired Watch4net in an all-cash deal for an undisclosed sum, and it will make the company a part of its Infrastructure Management Group.

Watch4net's flagship software product, APG, is a performance management application that reports real-time, historical and expected performance of network, data center and cloud infrastructures. It is used to provide consistent business services delivery while detecting and troubleshooting potential problems.

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EMC has been working with Watch4net for several years by reselling its technology as part of EMC's IT Operations Intelligence suite, or ITOI, said Ken MacDonald, senior director of marketing for the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage giant's Infrastructure Management Group.

ITOI provides IT availability management, correlations and root analysis across converged network, storage and compute infrastructures, MacDonald said.

"It lets users know the services they provide to their businesses will run as expected," he said. "This is a key requirement as the industry moves to converge management. Watch4net watches performance metrics across the environment. If it sees something exceeding users thresholds, it signals ITOI, which then looks for the root cause of the problem."

EMC could have continued its partnership with Watch4net, but decided that it would rather have control of that company's performance management intellectual property, MacDonald said.

"As customers deploy cloud-based solutions, they need to be confident of their infrastructures," he said. "We just want to make this a complete EMC-branded solution."