EMC Corporation announced that it has acquired Montreal-based Watch4net, a privately-held provider of enterprise and carrier-class performance management software that provides real-time, historical and projected visibility into network, data center and cloud infrastructure performance. The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2012 fiscal year.

As customers continue virtualizing data centers on their journey to cloud computing, two fundamental requirements have emerged:

Availability management, to determine if components are functioning and available

Performance management, to track any system or component degradation, plot trending and intervene as needed

Through its EMC IT Operations Intelligence Suite, EMC has delivered one of the industry's premier availability management solutions for physical and virtual storage, networks and compute resources. Complementing this, EMC is now offering Watch4net's rich set of performance management capabilities.

Watch4net has worked closely with EMC over the last seven years to deliver proven, enterprise and carrier-class solutions to meet customers' IT management needs. Already tightly integrated with IT Operations Intelligence Suite today, Watch4net leverages EMC's topology awareness, instrumentation and management console.

EMC continues to expand on one of the industry's most comprehensive IT management portfolios for enterprises and service providers. This portfolio not only includes IT infrastructure management via the IT Operations Intelligence Suite, EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) for managing VCE Vblock platforms and Watch4net, but also includes tight alignment with IT Service Level Management via VMware and Security Management and Compliance via RSA. This broad set of capabilities is critical to address customers' diverse management requirements as they continue their journey to cloud computing and look to deliver IT-as-a-Service.

According to a recent Enterprise Management Associates report, the changes brought forth by the dual disruptive trends of server virtualization and cloud services "are nothing less than revolutionary to many IT organizations, spawning re-assessments of management tools, technologies, and practices in order to achieve cross-domain alignment to the new service-oriented mandate." The report, Network Management and the Responsible, Virtualized Cloud (February 2011), indicates that most organizations adopting server virtualization and cloud services are seeing direct impacts across multiple management disciplines and management tools as a result.

Michel Foix, Watch4net CEO, and the Watch4net team will report to Jay Mastaj, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Infrastructure Management Group.