EMC Acquires Partner Watch4net

EMC Corporation has acquired Montreal-based Watch4net, a privately-held provider of enterprise and carrier-class performance management software that provides real-time, historical and projected visibility into network, data center and cloud infrastructure performance.

The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2012 fiscal year.

As customers continue virtualizing data centers on their journey to cloud computing, two requirements have emerged:

• Availability management, to determine if components are functioning and available
• Performance management, to track any system or component degradation, plot trending and intervene as needed

Through its EMC IT Operations Intelligence Suite, EMC has delivered availability management solutions for physical and virtual storage, networks and compute resources. Complementing this, it is now offering Watch4net’s set of performance management capabilities.

Watch4net has worked closely with EMC over the last seven years to deliver enterprise and carrier-class solutions to meet customers’ IT management needs. Already tightly integrated with IT Operations Intelligence Suite, Watch4net leverages EMC’s topology awareness, instrumentation and management console.

EMC continues to expand an IT management portfolios for enterprises and service providers. This portfolio not only includes IT infrastructure management via the IT Operations Intelligence Suite, EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) for managing VCE Vblock platforms and Watch4net, but also includes alignment with IT Service Level Management via VMware and Security Management and Compliance via RSA. This set of capabilities addresses customers’ diverse management requirements as they continue their journey to cloud computing and look to deliver IT-as-a-Service.

According to a recent Enterprise Management Associates report, the changes brought forth by the dual disruptive trends of server virtualization and cloud services "are nothing less than revolutionary to many IT organizations, spawning re-assessments of management tools, technologies, and practices in order to achieve cross-domain alignment to the new service-oriented mandate." The report, Network Management and the Responsible, Virtualized Cloud (February 2011), indicates that most organizations adopting server virtualization and cloud services are seeing direct impacts across multiple management disciplines and management tools as a result.

Michel Foix, Watch4net CEO, and the Watch4net team will report to Jay Mastaj, SVP and GM, EMC Infrastructure Management Group.

Jay Mastaj, SVP and GM, EMC Infrastructure Management Group, said: "Today’s rapidly-growing and dynamic IT infrastructures carry an ever-looming mandate to stay on top of absolutely everything happening within them. Regardless of where customers are along their journey to cloud computing, insight into every aspect of IT performance and the ability to manage it without growing staff and with increasing granularity, are no longer optional. By bringing Watch4net into the EMC portfolio and roadmap, EMC rounds out its world-class IT management solution to address customers’ most critical IT management needs across their physical and virtual IT environments."

Michel Foix, CEO, Watch4net, said: "IT availability and performance management are ever-changing, and the advent of cloud computing has increased the need for an end-to-end, seamless solution. Watch4net and EMC have worked together for more than seven years on a unified mission. We are extremely proud to be joining the EMC family and look forward to the continued development and market adoption of our flagship product suite, APG."

About Watch4net
Watch4net is a provider of service assurance software. Watch4net’s flagship product, APG, is a carrier-class performance management application that provides real-time, historical and projected visibility into the performance of the network, data centers and cloud infrastructures. Corporations rely on Watch4net’s APG solution to ensure consistent delivery of business services, detect and troubleshoot problems quickly, and gain full visibility on the infrastructure performance and health.

Watch4net was established in 2000 and is headquartered in Montreal.