SolarWinds, Inc., provider of powerful and affordable IT management software to more than 88,000 customers worldwide, has acquired certain of the assets of Tek-Tools, Inc., a privately-held company with offices in Dallas, TX and Chennai, India, with a combination of cash and stock for up to $42 million.

Tek-Tools' Profiler suite of products gives users visibility into the performance of storage and virtualized server infrastructures. The addition of Tek-Tools' offerings to the SolarWinds Orion product portfolio will add management of enterprise storage infrastructure to existing network and applications management capabilities, delivering an end-to-end IT management solution.

"As the need for comprehensive management of highly networked physical and virtualized IT resources becomes more and more critical to enterprises of all sizes, we believe that this transaction uniquely positions us to provide a more complete solution that IT teams need to support their environments," said Mike Bennett, SolarWinds' Chairman and CEO.

"Over the past 10 years, we've proven that our technology solves complex problems in very simple ways and that our business model of delivering powerful, easy to use, low-cost management solutions can succeed for a wide range of customers. The integration of Tek-Tools' storage and virtualization management products is an important addition to our product portfolio that will allow us to respond to customer demand for an end-to-end IT management solution that offers deeper visibility into networked storage and virtualized environments," said Bennett.

The SolarWinds Orion product family has long offered companies of all sizes network, systems and application management through products such as Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and Orion Application Performance Monitor (APM). Tek-Tools' products will add deeper storage and virtualization management to the SolarWinds portfolio, delivering broader IT management capabilities and increasing IT organizations' efficiency and responsiveness.

"The collision of technologies like virtualization and cloud computing with business forces like 'lean IT' is putting pressure on IT organizations to rethink their management approach; functions that were once discrete will need to merge or collaborate more effectively," said Kenny Van Zant, SolarWinds' SVP and Chief Product Strategist.

"Today's data centers include application servers, virtualization layers and storage all dependent on an 'always available' network, and the ongoing adoption of virtualization and the associated storage needs continue to drive the demand for and importance of networked storage," continued Van Zant. "Systems administrators have to be more network-aware, storage teams must tighten integration with the virtualization teams and network engineers need visibility beyond the routers and switches they manage today."

Tek-Tools' Profiler Suite will continue to be available from SolarWinds and select channel partners.