Sun Microsystems has acquired CenterRun Inc., a privately-held company based in Redwood City, California that provides software that enables customers to provision, track and update their networked application services.
This acquisition, says Sun, solidifies its N1 strategy. Combined with the N1 Provisioning Server, which performs infrastructure virtualisation and provisioning, customers will be able to operate data centres in a highly efficient and highly flexible manner.
Pursuant to the terms of the agreement, Sun will acquire CenterRun in an all cash transaction. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of Sun’s 2004 fiscal year. This acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Following completion of the acquisition, CenterRun will become an integral part of Sun’s Software organisation under the leadership of Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president, Software.
“With this acquisition, Sun extends its leadership yet again, beyond competitive rhetoric and illusory financial commitments, to real technology and products,” says Schwartz. “N1 enables IT departments to manage their data centres more efficiently, by moving from a ‘systems view’ of the data centre, to an applications and services view. By automating the complexity of application provisioning across thousands of servers, CenterRun enhances our N1 vision and strategy and, enables customers to manage their data centres as a single system. Sun and N1 can dramatically increase utilisation and agility, while driving down cost and complexity.”
CenterRun’s technology automates the process for provisioning applications including the distribution, configuration and setup of packaged and custom applications, patches and updates. CenterRun’s technology also enables the complete simulation of application deployments before any changes are formally instituted. As a result, customers are able to ensure that key requirements for success are in place before full-scale deployment. CenterRun’s technology can deploy updates and patches on demand to hundreds or potentially thousands of systems across heterogeneous computing environments, so customers have a single real-time view of what software is installed across their organisation.
CenterRun is generating software license revenues today due in part to the broad functionality of its products and the relative ease of deployment, as compared to other technologies. Traditional provisioning technologies can take months or quarters to deploy and to begin generating a return on investment. In contrast, customers using CenterRun’s product, which reduces the number of provisioning tasks, can be up and running in five to ten days, thereby ensuring a faster return on investment.