IBM Acquires Think Dynamics for Policy-Based Utility Provisioning

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has acquired a small, privately held company based in Toronto, Canada, that may just hold one of the pivotal technologies in the goal all vendors have of creating true dynamic, utility computing. The company, Think Dynamics, is significant because it created a tool called ThinkControl that is based on Java and Web services standards and creates a pool of IT resources that can be allocated to applications dynamically based on policies set by business managers.

While IBM's Tivoli systems management products can monitor all kinds of servers and operating systems for problems an alert administrators to issues--and in some cases do so proactively--they do not behave as proactively as a shared resource pool such as the kind IBM wants to create with its On Demand initiative. And while IBM's zSeries mainframes, pSeries Unix servers, and iSeries midrange servers all have some dynamic resource allocation and virtualization technologies, they are all incompatible and unique to each other. This is a problem, obviously. And when you throw Windows, Linux, and non-IBM servers in the mix, which IBM Global Services most certainly has to do, IBM's On Demand strategy needs a cross-platform, consistent product to deal with the provisioning of IT resources.

That's where Think Dynamics comes in with ThinkControl, which was launched in February 2002. IBM inked a deal to sell the software in May 2002, and having seen that it fits in its On Demand strategy--and fills a gap where it currently does not have a product--Big Blue snapped up the company like a trout does mayflies. Hewlett-Packard, which just announced its Adaptive Enterprise strategy alternative to IBM's On Demand, must not be entirely too happy with the IBM deal, having just signed up Think Dynamics as one of its Blade Alliance partners for its "QuickBlade" ProLiant BL servers back in March. But HP might be even more concerned than that. You see, the Utility Data Center (UDC) virtualization and provisioning tool that HP launched last year is built on software created by a company called Terraspring, which was eaten by Sun Microsystems in November 2002 to beef up its N1 virtualization and provisioning initiative. ThinkControl was an obvious alternative to Terraspring, but not any more.

The financial details behind the acquisition were not disclosed. Think Dynamics was founded in September 2000, and has gained financial backing from venture capitalists Brightspark Ventures, CDP Sofinov, and OMERS. In July 2001, Brightspark kicked in $11 million Canadian ($7 million US) to Think Dynamics. The acquisition by IBM is part of a $10 billion On Demand initiative. More to the point, it is central to a plan by IBM's Toronto software labs to add 100 people to its On Demand software effort. Of Think Dynamics 36 employees, all but CEO Alan McMillan will move to IBM, most of the people are going to IBM's Toronto labs. (That leaves another 65 people to hire.)

Robert LeBlanc, general manager of IBM's Tivoli unit, said the Think Dynamics products will be brought under the Tivoli organization and brand and that IBM expected to continue to sell ThinkControl as a standalone product. But he also said the provisioning technology behind ThinkControl would be absorbed into products from IBM's Systems Group and Software Group, and that IBM's Global Services unit would be using the product to roll out On Demand utility computing and outsourcing for that services organization's customers. It is likely that IBM will sell hybrid services based on ThinkControl that allow customers to build internal utilities for their own data processing needs, and then use ThinkControl to reach outside of the data center into an IBM-based utility for spare capacity in the event that a spike in demand is really large.

Because ThinkControl is based on Sun's J2EE Java standard and the evolving Open Grid Services Architecture (standard), LeBlanc said he expected the integration of Think Dynamic's products into the IBM portfolio would be very quick. IBM endorses J2EE in all of its platforms and will soon endorse Open Grid Services Architecture across the board as well. Being a set of Java programs means that IBM can support just about any modern platform with the ThinkControl product, and can easily weave it into its own z/OS, AIX, OS/400, Windows, and Linux products. Exactly when IBM rolls out products and services based on the ThinkControl product onto each of these platforms is anybody's guess at this point. But rest assured they will come to all of these platforms as quickly as IBM can roll them out.

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