Mainframe systems administration software house BMC Software Inc has taken its first step into the world of client-server computing by acquiring Patrol Software Pty Ltd for $33.7m in cash. Patrol Software is primarily based in Australia, but also has operations in California, and the firm’s flagship product is its Patrol systems management software. This has a distributed event manager based on intelligent agents that monitor and control heterogeneous computing environments from a single point on the network. The two firms originally got together to discuss a technology exchange, but then decided they could gain more by merging, which they have now done. Patrol Software Inc staff have been moved into BMC headquarters in Houston, Texas, but the Patrol name will be retained for that company’s existing offerings, which are available from BMC and existing Patrol distributors now. While Patrol Software wanted to broaden its product set and was interested in BMC’s knowledge of the DB2 relational database arena, BMC had been developing a client-server infrastructure to manage high-end servers for some time. BMC now intends to take Patrol Software’s framework and lay its own tools over the top. It also plans to integrate some of its existing tools with Patrol’s in such areas as change management for relational databases. Patrol Software, on the other hand, will take the repository and communications infrastructure BMC developed to expand its own framework at the high end, so it can cope with hundreds of Unix servers. Elements of this will be incorporated into Patrol version 2.0, scheduled for release in April, but will be further rolled out in later versions throughout this year.
