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According to a recent Gartner press release, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets by 2012:

Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.

This is a bold statement. If we believe Gartner, it means that we are at the beginning of an explosion in cloud-based services managed by trusted providers on behalf of the enterprise. Of course not all businesses will choose this path, but a substantial number of industries can and will. As I blogged about earlier, the message from the CFO office is clear. We will see adoption rates rise dramatically as the benefits of cloud services become more obvious to business leaders.

A second point of interest is the prediction that by 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings).

Here’s the take-away:

Gartner is seeing India-centric IT services companies leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labor-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing. The collective work from India-centric vendors represents an important segment of the market’s cloud aggregators, which will offer cloud-enabled outsourcing options (also known as cloud services).

We are witnessing examples of what GE innovation consultant Vijay Govindarajan calls reverse innovation in IT. Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the CEO of Tata Consultancy Services notes:

I’ve seen the new cloud-based computing models for applications and processes gaining currency in emerging markets. Rural cooperative banks and small and medium businesses in India are actually far ahead of their western counterparts in adopting these models. In fact, companies from emerging markets, buoyed by strong domestic revenues and revival in growth, have been making adjustments to their global strategies and fine-tuning their investments in order to be part of the recovery process in the west and build on their global expansion plans.

As the enterprise embraces the cloud, they’ll need a maturity model to help them on their journey. My next post will explore what the maturity model for cloud storage looks like. 

The Parallels Summit has been very successful for Mezeo, with excellent booth traffic, a number of leads and we still have this afternoon to go. Our business development and partner discussions have also been productive.

Why blog about this? Because this is representative of two secular trends in the hosting industry. First, the industry is maturing, the business issues are more compelling and the opportunities and the vendors are more serious and engaged. Second, the interest in the cloud and cloud storage is at an all time high. It’s really that simple and that visible.

A recent report by Forrester's Andrew Reichman titled Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage: Current And Planned Adoption Of Storage-As-A-Service Is Minimal For Now paints a picture for cloud storage adoption, that at first blush, is not encouraging.

He states:

In Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009 survey, we asked businesses about their interest in "hosted storage capacity" offerings. Interest was minimal at best. Forty-three percent of all respondents said that they were simply not interested, and another 43% said that they were interested but had no plans to move forward.

While it could be argued that as a cloud storage supplier, I am necessarily bullish about the ultimate prospects, I believe the data is actually quite good and clearly represents what we are experiencing in the marketplace.  Now, Mezeo is engaged with many service providers, as well as the early adopters in the enterprise space as they begin their evaluations.

When I look at enterprise cloud-storage adoption based on Everett Rogers' diffusion curve I see a pretty clear view of the typical market place approach to adoption of disruptive technologies:    

For new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies, we should look for what the next practices are, i.e. the practices of the innovators and early adopters. The survey reflects the typical technology adoption cycle and re enforces what we are experiencing in the market place.

11% of companies are taking the plunge - these are the early adopters and innovators.  The early majority (43%) is interested, and watching.  The late majority is not in the game, yet.

So we are on track. And to prove it, let's look at one of these enterprise-level innovators: General Electric.

According to IBM storage expert Tony Pearson, GE has implemented cloud-based backups and archive for GE Corp, NBC Universal and GE Asset Management divisions running at only 32 cents per GB/month, representing a 40-60 percent savings over their previous methods. This includes backups of their external Web sites, archives of their digital and production assets, RMAN backups including development/staging databases. They plan to add out-of-region compliance archive in 2010. They also plan to monetize their intellectual property by offering "CloudStorage Manager" as a software offering for others.

1. Security will continue to be a big issue for the cloud, and, unfortunately, there will be at least one event this next year that is disruptive to Cloud Storage adoption, be it data loss or unauthorized data access.  Security will be an even more important point of evaluation for the use of specific Cloud Storage service offerings. The “trusted service provider“  becomes a requirement when selecting a cloud offering.
   
   
2. Cloud Storage will be characterized by a single word, “more”!  More adoption, more cloud storage offerings by more IT service providers, more variation in cloud capabilities, and more worries and concerns about the cloud.
   
   
3. The intersection of enhanced mobile devices with better wireless bandwidth will be combined with Cloud Storage to create exciting new work/life blended digital life applications. The user experience is of paramount importance.
   
   
4. Cloud Storage will see extraordinary adoption as a solution for backup, archiving and for policy-based georeplication for disaster recovery.

As we enter 2010, I am going to focus on a series of articles to define the cloud storage opportunity and the business issues for the enterprise.  First, there are some "universal truths" that we need to better understand and define. 

The growth in unstructured data will continue, unabated.  We all know and understand that.  The issue is how to manage this phenomenon, while operating with the assumption that the growth will likely accelerate.  Since the growth is driving increased costs, the enterprise is on a continuous search to improve the way they can cost-effectively manage this growing data.  

Data may exist on removable media, on PCs and PDAs, on various servers within the organization, at data centers, at remote facilities, and potentially at various outsourced service providers.  The data may range from employee personal information (and even personal information from the employees associates) that is not associated with the needs of the business to non-confidential and confidential business information, some of which may be highly critical.  Disparate policies will need to be applied to the data ranging from no control to extreme control.   Of course, there will be the existence of  multiple versions of files adding to the total storage and further exacerbating the challenges of management.

There are many potential solutions to the problem as stated above, and most of them involve some sort of additional controls, policies and restrictions that control the proliferation of data and make it more orderly and secure.  These solutions are then combined with additional focus on reducing storage costs by staying aligned with new storage technology (which continues to reduce costs of storage), and the cycle repeats, endlessly.  In each cycle, trade-offs associated with costs, availability, security, access, restrictions occur, and rarely is there a "perfect" solution.

Is cloud storage a possible solution to the issues as surfaced above?  Is it a discontinuity, a departure, from the "business as usual" cycles associated with ongoing, incremental and continuous storage improvements when new technologies are introduced as they can be accommodated?  

Let's start with discussing cloud storage and its various capabilities.  Note that we are talking about a storage cloud that is housed at the enterprise data center, not a storage service provider.

(1) First, centralize the storage problem:

Cloud Storage addresses the necessary size and scale of unstructured data growth in the enterprise.  Generally, highly scalable file systems, including newer object based systems, provide the ability to manage incredibly large numbers of objects (objects of all sizes) in an efficient fashion.  This is combined with low cost commodity storage devices and servers.  Then a centralized storage pool is ready for use.  It is generally easy to add additional storage to this pool, and both backup and disaster recovery schemes are in place.  So, the first well known method of problem solving that cloud storage utilizes is "centralization."  Let's get a solution in place that we know can scale to the size of the data needs of the enterprise.
 
(2) Second, make it easy to use:

You can't use it if you can't get it, and this is where the topic of "thin provisioning" emerges.  Thin provisioning just means that it is easy to get a storage account (whether I am an individual user or an application / server) and I can get it quickly, no matter how much I need (in theory).  Further, as my storage needs increase, it is easy to get more - quickly.  There are issues like accounting for storage; managing growth and billing for it that also surround the notion of thin provisioning. 

Access is another big topic that surrounds ease of use. The enterprise has multiple needs here.  Legacy applications, utilizing file access methods like CIFS or NFS, will want to utilize the storage cloud.  New applications, written to REST Web services APIs, will also want to coexist.   Finally, individual users will want access from all their device types, including PCs (Windows and Mac, Linux), the Web, and PDAs.  All of this access manifests itself in interesting ways, including identity management of the credentials associated with using the service, bandwidth requirements for accessing the service from many diverse locations, and geo location of data (i.e., if you have several locations where the cloud data is kept, how do you decide which location to use?).

(3) Third, sync your files to the cloud:

Now that you have cloud storage, you ought to think about backup and sync to the cloud.  These two applications are different but somewhat linked.  Sync to the cloud can be used for both cloud loading (getting the data from the device to the cloud, in a background way so that the latency will not be a problem) as well as keeping a current copy in the cloud, but using the local copy on your device (the best of both worlds).  Since your most current copy is in the cloud, it is your backup copy.  Sync is also a solution for keeping files "sychronized" between devices and the cloud, so you always have an authoritative source of your file stored in the cloud.  Of course, all this is based on having cloud access from any device, anywhere (see number two, above).

(4) Fourth, create new, higher impact applications with programmable storage:

Programmable (using http, SOAP or REST APIs) access to storage is the next big revolution in storage.  Tagging, sharing, collaboration, easy search, easy and secure access and multiple views make creating new, high impact applications easier than before.  Take advantage of new functionality that is easily delivered.  Create applications that rely on your data and data that is external to the enterprise.  Develop these applications quickly and at lower cost.  If all you want is cheaper storage, you may be able to get by without a cloud, but without this capability you are missing the revolution that is upon us.

(5) Fifth, secure your cloud:

In my own survey of the industry, security is the major issue on the minds of the IT department evaluating cloud storage for the enterprise.  Several different aspects of security come into play.  Many of these issues are most often associated with using a multi-tenant storage cloud from a storage service provider. Nevertheless, four major security issues prevail before we even begin to consider the issues of going to the cloud at a service provider.

The four issues are:  physical security, unauthorized access, data loss (disaster or device failure related) and bit rot (a subset of data loss, granted).   All of these issues are no different than what you face with your traditional shared storage solutions and most of the solutions are similar.  Your current IT physical security solutions apply to an enterprise hosted cloud.   The identity management policies and practices associated with creating and maintaining account credentials address unauthorized access, just as they do with your current data management practices. Encryption can provide additional protection from unauthorized access. As a matter of fact, the security issues are already in play with your current storage methodology, so nothing new here, unless you move to a service provider hosted cloud (more on this later).

(6) Sixth, lower the cost of storage:

Cloud storage delivers the benefits as discussed in items one through four above, while requiring similar security to current storage activities.  How does it address costs?  First, cloud storage solutions generally allow for using commodity hardware, very scalable file systems, and highly automated provisioning and management solutions.  So, the hardware price equation of differentiation and premium pricing is disrupted.  True, the software doesn't come cheap, but remember that the public cloud storage services are "making the market" and the combination of commodity hardware, environmentals, and enabling software (file system, management and middleware from one or more suppliers) is meeting the external marketplace pricing.  Here is a simple model you should use (all figures expressed in cents/GB/Mo):

Commodity Hardware depreciation                                      $  .02
Environmentals  (data center, power and cooling)                     .02
Management (primarily people resources)                                .02
Enabling Software                                                                  .03 
Other                                                                                    .01                           

Total costs:                                                                      $  .10 (10 cents/GB/Month)

This represents a significant saving for a solution that provides all the capabilities that cloud storage delivers.  What's the catch?  Well, not every type of application and use case for unstructured data is ideally served by cloud storage.  However, many are, and the exceptions should be dealt with as one offs.  The real catch is not taking advantage of this new technology, and all the opportunities it offers, for lowering cost while delivering improved capabilities to end users and applications around the enterprise.

My next post will discuss hybrid, private and public cloud storage offerings, and where savings and security can drive significant benefits for enterprises who take advantage of the cloud storage offerings of service providers.

CloudStorageStrategy.com welcomes OpSource CEO Treb Ryan for an in-depth interview on cloud computing, from the perspective of the service provider.

NOTE: OpSource is a customer of Mezeo Software, the underwriter of this blog.

What are the opportunities you see in the cloud computing space, both for OpSource and your customers, and what impact has the downturn had on this?

It's interesting, but when people talk about cloud computing, they immediately go to the downturn and pricing - and cost being the big driver.  There's no question that cloud computing is cost effective, and it's accelerating adoption many times over, but what we're really seeing is something much more fundamental - a generation of users who are entering the workforce who've been using cloud computing all along; they've grown up on the Internet, and their interface to technology has always been through the Internet. 

As a result, this "Cloud Generation" has clear expectations of how technology should work:

1) it should be immediately available,
2) you do a search and get going,
3) it should be very flexible,
4) you should have ubiquitous access - anytime, anywhere,
5) sharing and collaboration - the expectation to collaborate and share anything they are working on.

This is not a generation which distinguishes between work data and home data - like my generation did. They've grown up with the concept of APIs and communities that grow around them; for instance, we see programmers who have grown up with Google and Facebook APIs, and now they expect that kind of thing in their work applications as well. So they're coming into the workforce and driving change in the workplace. They see technologies like client-server applications or hard-coded storage arrays pretty much the same way my generation saw green screens, mainframes, and mini-computers - as dated, inflexible, technology - hard to use, without nearly the power of cloud-based systems. So they have the day-to-day experience of the "consumer cloud" which they're now driving into business applications as well. 

To the Cloud Generation of programmers this means anything they can interact with on the Cloud they can program to through APIs. The idea of infrastructure being an item that can be addressed as part of the application, instead of something the application lays on top of, is a radical concept.  It has allowed not only for innovative applications, but also for true elastic computing making the Cloud environment even more flexible.



Great Cloud offerings have great communities around them. This is the aspect of Cloud computing that is so often missed - and even scoffed at - by the IT folks who think it's all about virtualization. One of the biggest gripes about Cloud computing is that support is done by the Community and not the vendor. While most will agree that far more proactive vendor support is necessary for Cloud computing, Community support is just as critical. For questions of configuration and usage tricks, the Community is a far better source of information than some call center employee with limited access. Often the Community devises more innovative solutions than the vendor ever could. And in addition to support, the Community can create third-party add-ins that make the Cloud even more useful.

The downturn has accelerated adoption from the top down as well.

We're seeing executives who have become enamored with this idea of the cloud - because of the ability to turn capital expenditures into operational expenses - and are pushing cloud computing into their organizations.  The CEO of one of our customers went so far as to tell his technical people - "now can you finally start using the cloud so I can get the board off my back?"

So, for different reasons, we have both top-down and grass-roots support for cloud-based applications, which makes this very interesting to say the least.

Which customer segments do you see leading the way in adoption?

Obviously, our traditional focus has been on ISVs and start-ups coming into Software-as-a-Service, business applications in the cloud, and we're seeing continued adoption of cloud infrastructure by those segments, but what has been interesting is that now that we offer the ability for any company to buy and use cloud infrastructure for any type of application, we're seeing a much broader spread of usage and adoption. Beyond the enterprise we also see widespread adoption by systems integrators, consultants, and VARs - upto 40% of our customer base - all without us targeting that segment at all.

How does OpSource differentiate its cloud offerings from other service providers?

We offer the best of the public cloud, combined with enterpise security and compliance, performance guarantees, and enterprise controls.

For instance, we offer:

• easy online sign-up & purchase with infrastructure provisioning in minutes
• pay by the hour and only for what you use, with no commitment (or purchase a monthly plan for a discount)
• a rich online community to share and collaborate with peers; get third party add-ins, images and configurations
• a web interface plus complete set of APIs

On the straight cloud, we provide a lot of the more robust, enterprise tools than you see from more consumer-based providers like Amazon, for example.

We focus on three different areas:

1) Security and Compliance: we provide a much more secure environment, because Opsource provides every customer with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public Cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of public Internet connectivity. We also provide:

• Unique customizable security for firewalls
• VPN administration of all servers
• Unique username/password for each administrator
• Audit logs of all environmental changes
• SAS 70 audited
• 100% uptime SLA

2) Performance: we offer a multi-tier architecture with guaranteed latency in-between systems, sub-millisecond access time, industry standard technology, like VMware, instead of open-source, because that's where enterprise is comfortable.  Our 24/7 suppot also makes a diffence.

3) Control: today's cloud environment are single user environments, one user name and password, which is fine for individuals, but not so useful for the enterprise. We offer the ability to provision multiple users, do things like cross departmental billing, execute policy based control - which user can do what - and finally link all that back though an API to your existing management systems. So you can control how your users use the cloud same as you do your corporate datacenter.

So do you see any links into these large companies where they need to use ITIL for systems management?

Absolutely. OpSource has always focused on compliance as a major issue for our SaaS customers, eveything from SAS 70, PCI to European Safe Harbor, and even industry-specific ones like HIPAA, or government-specific certification, but in the cloud, we think about sophisticated  management techniques like federated authority and single sign-ons, and things like ITIL - while it's still in its infancy, it's shocking that most providers don't even have the ability to give their customers the critical capability to have more than one person manage the cloud for them - because they have a single user accounts. So while you can institute more sophisticated IT governance regimes like ITIL with the OpSource cloud, we give IT the capability to manage who does what, and track who did what, even if they aren't ready for something like ITIL.

So IT gets to do their own provisioning?   
  
Yes. So you want to know who provisioned what, how much it costs, and we give them that visibility instantly across their entire user community.  That way there are no surprises or charges they aren't aware of. It sort of reminds me of the controls I had to put in to alert me to my daughter's texting costs - so I'm aware of the charges before they get out of hand! I just blogged about this issue.

That's why you say that OpSource is what Amazon wants to be when it grows up... 

Absolutely.

And that's how you respond to cloud critics - the ones that say that the Cloud is not yet ready for the enterprise.

There are large parts of the cloud that are not yet ready for the enterprise. The cloud is still young, and it would be like asking that first 286 PC to run all of your corporate financials. However, a lot of these issues around enterprise adoption like security and compliance have been addressed, and are being taken care of, so as the cloud becomes more robust, we'll see increased adoption. We're seeing enterprise-level capabilities come to market that did not even exist six months ago.

We have just signed a partnership agreement under which OpSource will resell Gomez's Web performance management solution to our enterprise customers as well as use it to validate and monitor our own cloud performance service level agreements (SLAs). Through this partnership, we'll bring powerful performance monitoring to cloud computing, making it easier and more compelling than ever for enterprises to justify bringing their applications to the cloud.

Do you see infrastructure elements like storage growing now?

For true, full use of the cloud, we have to have the ability to access storage, go though the APIs to get to it, and give our customers a range of storage solutions, including cloud storage based on the specific application or need. We're giving our customers the widest range of choices.

What about agile programming? I heard you use agile methods to improve the customer experience.

Agile programming methods have helped us with not only development, but compliance and security as well. We talk to our customers to see how they are using our cloud offerings though our community, and we learn what's important to them.

We also test our offerings by having two programmers work on the same keyboard - literally  - one with the user story - so they can make sure that the customer is getting the exact functionality they need.

It's agile customer service.

Can you tell us a bit about your enthusiasm for composite applications (corporate mashups) and how they help your platform?

Of all the phenomenon in the cloud, we see the need for anytime-anywhere access and the idea that anything I can interact with I should also be able to program to.  So when Facebook enthusiasts start working in the enteprise, they bring their enthusiasm for integration as well.

So we see things in the cloud like direct access to the infrastructure as part of the application, which allows for all sorts of flexibility and robust usage.

We see real-time reporting applications of every kind you can imagine.  I myself am addicted to checking on everything that's coming out of our billing and customer systems tied into our Salesforce tabs.  So I'm always checking on the business in real-time via my iPhone.

I say this a lot, but integrating SaaS is a huge issue for today's enterprise. OpSource Connect can help SaaS companies -- of any size -- overcome integration hurdles and break out of the SaaS-only box. This speeds up adoption of SaaS in larger enterprise environments, opening the door for on-demand companies to cultivate business with large systems integrators. Plus, I'd say we're the only company providing Web operations from the ground up, addressing operational infrastructure, application management, and business operations. Today, integrations are expensive and one-to-one. For instance, while you can currently integrate your application with Google Maps as a composite application, OpSource Connect lets you integrate your app with many others, using just one platform. You can integrate your application with, for example, SAP, salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks, NetSuite, and a host of other SaaS and legacy applications. 

Everything is much more dynamic today, and programmers expect that. 

A lot has been written about the reluctance of many to use the cloud for their mission critical applications, and in particular, the enterprise.  While this may be a popular topic from the perspective of many, the Cloud is most certainly seeing a significant increase in adoption as more and more companies build their SaaS offerings on platforms from Amazon, Google, Force.com and Microsoft.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is defined in Wikipedia as "the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet--with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users. It's also known as cloudware."

In general, PaaS offerings include workflow facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services are provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.

We just saw another Cloud validation as three established ISVs announced offerings on platfoms from PaaS providers.  Both BMC Software and CA announced their intent to offer apps built on Force.com next year. Quest Software also announced the launch of its first set of Software as a Service (SaaS) Windows management solutions on Microsoft Azure.

Note also the following examples of SaaS services built on AWS, Google AppEngine and Force.com.  This "explosion of entrepreneurship"  further the case that platform-as-a-service is rapidly gaining acceptance in the market.



What we are witnessing is a boom in platform-based businesses, made possible by the cloud model: pay-per-use, instant scalability, and the elimination of up-front capex costs.

We have built a free Cloud Storage Toolkit for Service Providers to help them answer the question: “Should we enter the Cloud Storage marketspace?”

The toolkit includes a tutorial and a spreadsheet - both of which are accessible immediately when you sign up for our Cloud Storage Strategy newsletter.

THE TUTORIAL is a 15 page document which shows you how to use the Cloud Storage: A Business Model for Service Providers spreadsheet. It explains each of the 15 variables which make up the model, step-by-step.

[15-variable spreadsheet model]

THE SPREADSHEET is a customizable spreadsheet which takes in your input and is made up of three distinct parts: Inputs, Results, and Graphs.

You will input your individualized business model cost drivers which will in turn calculate your revenue generators.

The business model also calculates and graphs your gross margin, cumulative cash flows, and plots your monthly recurring revenue against your monthly gross margin.

Register for the  Cloud Storage Strategy newsletter and get instant access to Cloud Storage: A Business Model for Service Providers >>

The announcement that Salesforce is integrating directly with cloud-storage Box.net is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the future of the cloud:

Techcrunch explains what Box.net is thinking:

CEO Aaron Levie says that this is the first step in Box.net's plan to give businesses a secure way to share their files across multiple services on the web. He says that many of the cloud services geared toward the enterprise don't work well together -- oftentimes you'll have to reupload the same content to multiple sites to share or edit it. Box.net wants to help unify these services by serving as the central hub for your uploaded files, which you can then access from these other web-based services. Levie hints that we'll be seeing more integrations with other services in the near future.

What we are witnessing is the future of enterprise IT infrastructure. We have been talking about programmatic access through RESTful APIs for some time now.  This move by Saleforce is an evolutionary step in how enterprise IT will manage its IT infrastructure - it will be a cross-cloud platform, with applications and open access to the storage cloud of your choice.

Security is not an issue, and the future is about cross-cloud collaboration.

Phil Wainewright says that Box.net wants to be the "Switzerland of Data" - he's right and wrong.  Cloud Storage, provided by the various service providers are going to be the "switzerland of data storage."  Vendor lock-in is going by the wayside.

ReadWrite is spot on when they say that "you can start to see how platforms will evolve into service networks - where enterprise users may subscribe and get access to applications that they pay for on a per use basis."

The biggest threat then, is to traditional software vendors, and applications like Sharepoint.  We will see heated debates on this very topic in the days and weeks ahead.

BMC Software's announcement that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited (Tideway), a provider of IT discovery solutions, can be interpreted as an extension of BMC's commitment to cloud-computing.

Here are two important statements in the press-release:

1. BMC will deliver unmatched visibility into the data center and rapidly reduce the time and resources required to model, manage and maintain applications and services. This is critical for IT organizations that are transitioning applications and services to cloud computing environments.

2. With the acquisition of Tideway, BMC adds the industry's leading application discovery and dependency mapping capabilities to manage and maintain complex data center environments including distributed, virtual and mainframe IT platforms and further extends its leadership in business service management.

So let's see what this could mean. 

It gives BMC the critical capability to discover and map complex data environments which are both physical and cloud-based.

This acquisition also puts BMC in a strong position to build a cloud-based CMDB.  While that might not happen right away, it is clearly now a key capability if they decide to pursue it. It also allows them to build a federated CMDB - and manage the hybrid cloud - private and public - across enterprise and hosted data centers. 

The evolution towards cloud-based ITIL continues.