Interview: IBM-Candle deal helps On Demand

With its acquisition on Thursday of its long-time business partner, Candle Corp., IBM believes it is taking an important step in moving its collection of On Demand strategies forward. Company officials believe Candle's assortment of systems management and monitoring capabilities for both mainframes and distributed platforms, including Windows and Linux, can strengthen its competitive stance against archrival Computer Associates.

Architect of the deal Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive for IBM's Software Group, talked with InfoWorld Editor At Large Ed Scannell about the deal and the impact it figures to have on a number of IBM's technical strategies that are all connected to its On Demand initiative.

IW: What does the Candle acquisition give you that you could not build yourself?

Mills: There is always the, "we could build it ourselves." We have lots of programmers and lots of capability, but life is short. When you look at make vs. buy, you look at the capabilities a company has created, their customer set, their skills set, and so if the price is right, an acquisition can be a very leveragable thing to do. As you know this is number 33 for me over the past decade so we have done this over and over again in our software business and we found we can get incredible leverage out of them. Candle is an 800-person company so it doesn’t have the market reach we do. Besides mainframe technologies they now have an extensive collection of distributed monitoring technologies for WebSphere, Web servers, and MQSeries. So we can get a lot of leverage out of that.

IW: What is the most immediate benefit to your On Demand set of strategies?

Mills: One of the biggest customer pain points is systems management and systems monitoring. When you start to get higher availability, you need to monitor what is taking place, and you want to take corrective action. These things are becoming more real time, more on the fly correction all the time. So you need a lot of monitoring tools and mechanisms that essentially bring back all that information so you can then take action on it. Candle adds a lot of that capability, but we will continue to develop and invent more instrumentation that gives us more information about what is happening inside of these products. The idea here is, if you have enough information, then you can take corrective information on the fly. If I know more accurately what is wrong with an engine, then maybe I can take corrective action to make that engine run right again.

IW: Does this acquisition help you further with your renewed focus on business intelligence?

Mills: Not directly. This is more in the systems management administration and tuning space. Databases have to be tuned too, so the tuning part of putting up a data warehouse is an important aspect of that. We will clearly get benefit in our database initiatives, but this is not a front-and-center thing for databases from a technology standpoint.

IW: And your content management strategies benefit here by association with databases?