IBM Buys Softek to Bolster Data Migration Offerings

Published: February 1, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM announced this week that it would pay an undisclosed sum to acquire Softek Storage Solutions, one of Big Blue's partners in the area of data migration between different servers, operating systems, and storage arrays. Softek has been a partner of IBM's for the past decade, and is a privately held company located in Vienna, Virginia, that has been able to sell over 10,000 licenses of its Transparent Data Migration Facility--a product that already carries an IBM-esque, mainframe-style name.

Softek was founded in April 2000 and has a rich mainframe heritage, since it was a spinoff of the former clone mainframe maker, Amdahl. That company was absorbed into long-time investor Fujitsu and Softek was spun out as a separate company four years later. Exactly how IBM and Softek have been partners since 1996, which Val Rahmani, general manager of the infrastructure management services unit it IBM's global technology services division claimed in the conference call with analysts and reporters on Monday, is unclear given when Softek was founded. But in 1999, when the product was called Amdahl TDMF and had 1,000 licenses in distribution, Big Blue was apparently selling the Amdahl data migration and replication software to customers.

"We've been partners for a decade," said Rahmani, "so we know what we are getting into."

What IBM wants to get into is a war with rival EMC, offering TDMF as a product for companies who want to buy it. Which should mean that IBM's Software Group, not its Global Services, should do the acquisition. But in the past year, as IBM has been trying to productize services, making them available in standard configurations with set prices and capabilities, Global Services has been the beneficiary of what normally would be product acquisitions to bolster the IBM catalog.

Internet Security Systems, a provider of security software, and MRO Software, which created applications to manage IT assets and which sells products through IBM's Tivoli unit as well as services based on that service through Global Services. With this in mind, Rahmani explained that TDMF would be offered through Global Services in two additional ways: as an outsourced product, which runs on systems outside of companies, and as a managed service, which is run by IBM inside companies.

Steven Murphy, chief executive officer at Softek, will be vice president of data mobility solutions at Global Services when the deal is completed before the end of the first quarter. Murphy said on the call that Softek has over 800 customers paying maintenance on software and over 10,000 licenses in the field. The company said at the end of 2006 that it had moved over 40 petabytes of data for its Fortune 1000 customers since 1996, when TDMF made its debut at Amdahl.

TDMF is not just a mainframe data migration and replication product, of course. By necessity, given the heterogeneous nature of data centers and applications these days, TDMF has to support Unix and Windows platforms, the databases that run on them, and the storage arrays that hook into them, too.

Softek has software in use at 60 percent of the Fortune 1000, in fact, which means only 200 customers are from smaller firms. In addition to the TDMF product, Softek sold a product called Logical Data Migration facility, which is only available on mainframes and which can move mainframe data sets around which the applications that use those data sets are still running. The company's Replicator product works on mainframe, Unix, and Windows platforms and can replicate data sets without the need to shut down applications; and its DR Manager is a business continuity extension to the other programs, which aids in recovery if servers or storage are knocked offline.

Both Murphy and Rahmani said that the IBM acquisition--and Softek's business over the past few years--was driven by the fact that data migration issues were often a bottleneck when it came to launching new revenue streams, consolidating servers, or moving around servers between data centers. Data migration and replication has moved on from box-to-box data movement, they said, and Murphy cited an industry statistic that claims 68 percent of data migration results in data loss. This is a kind of statistic that companies cannot allow, and that means moving away from manual, hodge-podge, or hybrid solutions cobbled from various tools by clever server and storage administrators to a unified approach that can span different kinds of servers spread out across one or more data centers. "Data movement has become an operational nightmare," said Murphy.

The 143 employees of the Softek will moved over to IBM, and the company will continue operating in its Vienna, Virginia, headquarters as well as maintaining its offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Dublin, and Kiel. The latter is a German office that came from last November's acquisition by Softek of Enigma Data Solutions. Enigma sells tape and disk storage management software for mainframes, which adds to capabilities in z/OS to make it easier for mainframe administrators to do their jobs. This software has been tweaked to support Parallel Sysplex and Geographically Distributed Parallel Sysplex mainframe environments, which are particularly cumbersome given that these are clustered mainframe platforms with various storage configurations.

Softek has 40 reseller partners, including Symantec, Fujitsu, Microsoft, and Oracle, and Rahmani said that all of them would be encouraged to join its PartnerWorld organization for resellers to distribute not only the Softek products and services, but other IBM products and services as well. While this is very open of IBM, in some cases, this seems very unlikely to happen.

RELATED STORIES

IBM Buys Security Expert ISS for $1.3 Billion in Cash

IBM Acquires Webify and MRO to Enhance Software, Services Offerings

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot