HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BMC Software (NYSE:BMC) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited (Tideway), a leading provider of IT discovery solutions. The acquisition will enhance BMC’s Business Service Management (BSM) platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.

“BMC acquiring Tideway is great news for us. We selected Tideway Foundation as the best of breed IT discovery tool and the BMC Atrium CMDB as the best of breed configuration management database,” said Linda Moreira, program director of data center moves at Standard Bank, one of Africa’s largest financial services groups. “Both solutions are already providing significant value, supporting a major data center migration project and our IT Service Management initiative. The acquisition should bring the benefit of rock-solid integration between discovery and the CMDB.”

The new offering supports the complete set of discovery requirements for BSM and features deep integration with BMC’s Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) based on Tideway’s long-time membership in BMC’s Technology Alliance Partner program. This presents customers an in-depth understanding of the relationships and dependencies of their physical assets and applications not currently available from any other vendor.

“The CMDB is most powerful when it has a clear understanding of infrastructure components, application dependencies and service relationships,” said Ronni Colville, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner, Inc. “Essential to that are solutions that automatically discover, model and maintain those relationships despite ongoing infrastructure changes. This information can empower IT organizations to make more timely and accurate change and configuration decisions and deliver better service to the business.”

The addition of Tideway technology provides BMC customers with the industry’s largest open library of predefined IT configuration discovery patterns. These patterns provide out of the box descriptions of software and hardware resources that allow IT organizations to automatically identify and characterize their environment and map related application dependencies and services.

When combined with the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) solution, BMC will deliver unmatched visibility into the data center and rapidly reduce the time and resources required to model, manage and maintain applications and services. This is critical for IT organizations that are transitioning applications and services to cloud computing environments.

“Given the nature of today’s highly complex and rapidly evolving computing environments, having deep visibility and clear understanding of the critical business services and their associated relationships to specific IT resources is fundamental to improving service quality, minimizing risk and reducing IT costs,” said Dev Ittycheria, president, Enterprise Service Management at BMC software. “With the acquisition of Tideway, BMC adds the industry’s leading application discovery and dependency mapping capabilities to manage and maintain complex data center environments including distributed, virtual and mainframe IT platforms and further extends its leadership in business service management.”

BMC expects the transaction to close within the week.

About Tideway

Tideway is the de facto standard for IT discovery. Foundation is an appliance that discovers your servers, software, dependencies and business applications. This single, automated view of application topology takes the cost and risk out of data center migration, consolidation and virtualization projects, accelerating ROI. Clients include Avis, Carphone Warehouse, Dresdner Kleinwort, ING, Linklaters, Mizuho Bank and Wachovia.

Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software.

The most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC’s comprehensive approach and unified platform help IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2009, BMC revenue was approximately $1.88 billion. Visit BMC.com for more information.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of BMC and its consolidated subsidiaries could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including the expected benefits and costs of the transaction; management plans relating to the transaction; the expected timing of the completion of the transaction; the ability to complete the transaction considering the various closing conditions; any statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management for future operations, including the execution of integration plans; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits may not materialize as expected; that the transaction may not be timely completed, if at all; that, prior to the completion of the transaction, Tideway’s business may not perform as expected due to transaction-related uncertainty or other factors; that the parties are unable to successfully implement integration strategies; and other risks that are described from time to time in BMC's Securities and Exchange Commission reports, including but not limited to the risks described in BMC's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009. BMC assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

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