BigFix becomes “BlueFix” – IBM announces acquisition of BigFix!
Today’s announcement by IBM that they are acquiring Neocleus Development Partner, BigFix, will rock the PC market in a way that surpasses any other acquisition in the past decade.
Immediate Impact
First off, this will dramatically change the PC Lifecycle Management and PC Security markets by combining the award-winning BigFix management and security technology with IBM’s vast sales, service and partner networks. As we’ve spoken to customers, analysts and other experts in the PC management market over the past 3 to 4 years, it has become apparent that BigFix’ approach, centered around an intelligent client technology and super-scalable architecture, is far superior to the existing oligopoly of Microsoft System Center, Symantec Altiris Client Management Suite, and LANDesk. In the best estimate of market share in the PCLM space, Microsoft System Center currently accounts for about 60-65% of the market. This position has been secured not by technological superiority, but because Microsoft had a stronger sales & marketing channel than some of the smaller competitors, such as BigFix. Growing organically, BigFix has been able to get to a relatively strong market size of about 10 million managed endpoints. By combining with IBM’s sales and global services teams, that number could easily grow to 100 million within the next few years – and much of that could come at the expense of Microsoft, especially if IBM builds a Global Services practice around migrating customers to the new offering.
The Future? IBM becomes a Relevant PC Platform Vendor Again
A secondary benefit that will occur by this merger is probably not so evident but could have an even broader impact on Microsoft, VMware and others. It revolves around IBM getting into the virtualization market. As announced earlier this year, BigFix and Neocleus have been collaborating on a partnership where client virtualization is merged with systems management and security technologies to create a new type of model, whereby the sytems & security agents reside OUTSIDE the core operating system instance, in a completely secure and protected operating system “stub”. When you couple this with the work that Intel is doing with vPro and Active Management Techology (AMT) , you end up with a completely new PC operating platform where Intel vPro is the base, AMT becomes a malleable management platform and IBM virtualization and management technologies sit on top, taking advantage of the underlying Intel paltform. In this architecture, the PC is no longer bound to the single OS instance. Windows becomes just a guest operating system – used only for the few legacy applications that require Win32 support. Over time, as more and more apps move to a web or other model, the importance of this Windows instance becomes diminshed.
Congratulations to Dave, Amrit, Philippe, Dennis, Greg and the rest of the BigFix team. It should be a very fun period for them, and great for customers, as this plays out.
Posted by Bill Corrigan 
