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Sun buys into remote management

Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 30 Nov 2004 09:05 GMT

Sun has signed a deal to acquire SevenSpace, a company whose technology is expected to expand Sun's remote-management services beyond what's possible with the computing giant's own equipment.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2005, Sun said on Monday, but terms of the all-cash transaction were not announced. SevenSpace has about 100 employees, Sun said.

The acquisition is aimed at expanding Sun services for remotely monitoring computing systems. For example, with Sun's Managed Services package, the company remotely operates customers' data centres. Additionally, Sun's Net Connect monitoring system can flag problems and provide information when a customer wants to involve Sun engineers in fixes.

Those services today can control only Sun servers, however. The SevenSpace acquisition would extend the services' reach to systems running Windows, Red Hat's Linux, and versions of Unix from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, Sun said. In addition, SevenSpace's technology can manage business software from Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP, as well as database software from Microsoft and Oracle.

Sun plans to incorporate SevenSpace within its services organisation under Marissa Peterson, executive vice-president of Sun Services. SevenSpace has more than 100 customers.

Sun plans to acquire SevenSpace's technology, but not all its employees. "Most of the SevenSpace people will be offered positions at Sun," spokeswoman May Petry said.