SolarWinds Buys Tek-Tools for Storage Resource Management

Network World — SolarWinds Wednesday announced it acquired for $42 million the technology, customer and employee assets of Tek-Tools, a storage resource management vendor that SolarWinds (SWI) executives say will enable the network management software maker to manage multi-vendor storage and virtual systems.

Hottest tech M&A deals of 2009

SolarWinds executives said on a conference call Wednesday that the storage resource and virtual systems management capabilities in Tek-Tools' Profiler suite will help SolarWinds broaden its product suite and offer customers end-to-end performance management of network, application, storage and virtual systems. SolarWinds will sell Tek-Tools' stand-alone products immediately, and expects to sell Profiler as a module of SolarWinds' Orion network management portfolio by year-end.

"This acquisition will enable SolarWinds to offer a broader product set that allows our customers to benefit from expertise in managing virtualization storage infrastructure," SolarWinds President and CEO Michael Bennett said on the call. "It is a great fit for SolarWinds."

The transaction, which is already closed, was driven in part by customer demands and market trends, according to SolarWinds executives.

"With the trends toward virtualization, cloud computing and lean IT, storage is being driven to the network and accessed from anywhere," said Kenny Van Zant, SolarWinds vice president and chief product strategist. "Systems administrators need to be network-aware and network teams need tighter integration with the virtual team."

With this purchase, SolarWinds will be able to offer its core network management customers storage resource and virtual infrastructure management capabilities, but also approach Tek-Tools customers with SolarWinds monitoring tools. SolarWinds, which offers several free tools based on its commercial products, will also work to adapt Tek-Tools' storage management technology to SolarWinds' easy to download and install approach to network management, according to Van Zant.

"We believe SolarWinds can become the affordable, multi-vendor storage resource management provider and offer fully integrated offerings by the end of 2010," Van Zant added.

SolarWinds executives added that the company will gain customers, partnerships and employees as well as retain the top management team from Tek-Tools, according to the terms of the deal.

Do you Tweet? Follow Denise Dubie on Twitter here. 

This story, "SolarWinds buys Tek-Tools for storage resource management," was originally published at NetworkWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in infrastructure management at Network World.