IBM acquires BigFix

IBM has agreed to acquire BigFix, an IT compliance and management firm based out of California.

The company said that the acquisition would improve IBM's datacentre management and enterprise software offerings. BigFix's compliance software tools allow administrators to set and manage policies for up to 500,000 corporate PCs.

Additionally, IBM sees the policy management tools offered by BigFix as helping to boost security and energy efficiency by allowing companies to remotely manage user policies and set automatic shutdown times.

"BigFix automates some of the most time-intensive IT tasks across the most complex global networks, helping save organisations significant amounts of time, labor, and expense,” said IBM Tivoli software general manager Al Zollar.

"BigFix’s real-time visibility and control for globally distributed computing devices will complement IBM’s existing smarter datacentre offerings and strengthen our ability to build security into the fabric of the enterprise."

Following the close of the transaction, currently slated for the third quarter of 2010, BigFix will become part of IBM's software group.

As BigFix is a privately held company, terms of the deal were not disclosed.