Big Blue Buys Storage Services Firm

IBM has acquired NovusCG, a privately held storage solutions company, to bolster its storage services and software business.

The Manassas, Virginia-based firm will become part of the Storage and Data Services business unit in IBM Global Technology Services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Seven-year-old Novus employs 100 people and manages 25 petabytes in 60 data centers on five continents, co-founder Sean Garvey said on a conference call today. Its customers are “super enterprises,” he said: large multi-national corporations.

In addition to enterprise storage consulting services, Novus also offers two software solutions, ESP and Storage Enterprise Resource Planner (SERP), for storage management and resource planning.

Val Rahmani, general manager of Infrastructure Management Services for IBM Global Technology Services stated that the Novus acquisition “provides what clients have been missing — the information that will allow them to align their IT and business strategies.”

IBM said the combined capabilities of its Storage and Data Services division and Novus will improve “access to business information, enable stronger regulatory and corporate compliance, and boost … overall information technology performance. … IBM will be uniquely positioned to help clients reduce costs and better align their storage and data environment to their lines of business.”

The acquisition is the second this year of a Virginia-based storage services company for IBM’s Storage and Data Services unit, following the acquisition of data mobility and replication specialist Softek Storage Solutions in January.

Novus provides “a standardized, repeatable approach for assessing and optimizing storage in multi-vendor environments,” IBM said. The firm’s storage analysis and reporting software, tools and asset-based delivery model “will enhance IBM’s ability to produce services engagement results in reduced time.”

SERP software gives clients “an unprecedented view of their storage use at the line of business level, quickly identifies unnecessary duplicate storage and enables accurate chargeback and capacity planning,” IBM said.

Novus has been an IBM partner since 2003. Its clients can be found in banking and finance, government, healthcare, retail and telecommunications. Other Novus partners include Cisco Systems, CA, EDS, EMC, HDS, HP, Oracle, Sun/StorageTek, Symantec and Unisys.

IBM said Novus can also help it provide services for companies moving to “green” storage environments, and its technology will also complement IBM’s storage hardware and software offerings.

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