BMC Software has acquired privately held Phurnace Software, a developer of automation software intended to reduce the cost, complexity and risk to deploy and configure Java-based applications on physical, virtual and cloud environments.
BMC will sell and support Phurnace products as BMC BladeLogic Application Release Automation. The solution available fully automates the application deployment process to streamline implementations, reduce the risk of errors, and help customers avoid downtime and outages traditionally associated with manual or script-based processes.
BMC plans to embed Phurnace technology into the BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite, providing customers with seamless, rapid full-stack provisioning and compliance of all infrastructure layers including the operating system, patches, middleware and applications.
"If you look at an order to deliver a business service, at the heart of every business service is applications, and, increasingly those applications are web-based," Scott Fulton, vice president and general manager for the service automation business at BMC, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Phurnace essentially enables customers to roll out and configure their web-based applications in an automated fashion, much more quickly than they can do today-taking a problem that is typically solved through scripts and [instead] doing it through a model-based tool that accelerates deployment times to minutes and hours as opposed to days and weeks. That is the key proposition that they bring and, of course, at the same time that reduces labor and effort for customers as well as eliminates the risk of having humans involved in maintaining fragile, cumbersome capabilities." Fulton adds that Phurnace not only does this in a typical IT infrastructure setup, but can do that on a private cloud, or in a public cloud, or in a hybrid approach. "We have found their technology to fit in all those different ecosystems that customers happen to be deploying web apps today."
Phurnace technology integrates into existing BMC BladeLogic deployments, and provides the ability to model and deploy Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications for WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, and WebSphere Portal; complete elimination of scripting through automation and tokenization; rapid troubleshooting and remediation by auditing and synchronizing application server configurations; automatic migration of applications from one version of an application server to another; and the ability to preview and validate changes prior to deployment.
"A large number of our customers are some of the largest WebSphere customers in the world," notes Larry Warnock, senior director of corporate development at BMC, and formerly president of Phurnace. In addition to supporting the automatic deployment and configuration of the WebSphere Portal, he adds, "We also have direct integrations to IBM ClearCase as well as to IBM Rational Build Forge build system."
For more on BMC BladeLogic Application Release Automation, go here.