IBM Buys BigFix

If you are a partner offering any form of remote managed service to your customers it will be a a struggle to avoid the allure of cloud based platforms.

I have spoken before about the trend towards SaaS based services in the ITAM market and this trend is even more compelling amongst managed service providers.

Cost Competitiveness Driving Cloud Adoption

Any partner offering desktop outsourcing or remote managed services has the option of choosing a management platform (In which all customers are managed centrally) or using traditional point solutions for each customer (In which all customers are managed separately) See Diagram.

Single Vs Multi-Tenancy

Benefits of multi-tenancy

For service providers the benefits of Multi-Tenancy are:

• Lower Labour Costs
• Lower Hardware & Bandwidth Costs
• Economies of Scale
• One Migration Path

Migrating Enterprise Dinosaurs to the Cloud

The challenge for traditional ITAM vendors looking to deliver a compelling platform to managed service providers is that porting your tool across to a cloud based application is no easy task.

Some traditional client / server asset management frameworks have been twenty years in the making and involve numerous acquisitions enroute. Imagine trying to migrate the enterprise behemouth that is Tivoli across to a cloud app! Vendors are better off starting from scratch or acquiring technology.

So it comes as no surprise to hear that Big Blue has acquired BigFix. With IBM’s marketing oomph behind BigFix’s platform traditional players with big market share like Microsoft SCCM and Symantec Altiris could take a bit of a pounding as organisations migrate to the cloud for management of endpoints.

BigFix has around 200 employees, 120 partners, 700 customers and has sold it’s platform to MSP’s such as BT, Orange Business Services and WIPRO. The sale price was not disclosed.

Read the full press release here.