I have spent some time this week in the company of organisations that have been acquired by much larger vendors. For most organisations the acquisition process takes the acquired into a much larger enterprise and whilst access to the extra resources available with greater scale can be beneficial, it can also cause problems. This is especially the case when the acquired company brings something radically different to the solutions with which the larger vendor is comfortable.

As I mentioned this week I have been speaking with folks from a couple of vendors that have been acquired by much larger outfits in the recent past, namely Altiris and Wily. Both of these organisations are trying to leverage the benefits of being part of a much larger player, especially the potential additional sales reach, without either loosing their identity and, more importantly, without prospective customers loosing sight of them. Luckily for both of these vendors they have offerings that are easily distinguished from those of their new parents.

But significant challenges remain for both. With Altiris now part of Symantec and Wily (cunningly renamed CA Wily) part of CA both face the challenges of educating their new colleagues on where their particular offerings sit in the grand scheme of things and ensuring that potential buyers still see their solutions as being “independent” of the greater vendors offerings. To my mind a very similar course of action springs to mind.

Take CA Wily. CA is well known for its range of management tools, but management solutions, whilst extremely useful, do tend to lack any hint of excitement or leadership. Outside of IT management tools are usually perceived as being essential rather than valuable, although this is changing slowly. The CA Wily offerings on the other hand provide the potential to give information about service delivery that IT can use to communicate with its users in new ways using terminology that business managers understand. This offers CA the chance to use CA Wily to engage with potential customers from a completely different start point to its traditional engagements.

In the same way Altiris, now that it is part of Symantec, offers its owners the opportunity to talk to customers about utilising a repository, almost a foundation, on which IT services can be built and in which service status information can be unified. After all, the Asset Management and CMDB capabilities that are being offered by a range of vendors including Altiris have shot to prominence inside many enterprises over the course of the last year or two. This gives Symantec the option of starting conversations based on IT process and management characteristics rather than its more widely known Security and Storage Management offerings.

Both Wily and Altiris have now been embedded inside their larger parents for some time and it is important now for both vendors that they take steps to maintain their visibility independent of that of their parents. The last that either needs is be seen as providing solutions that only fit into enterprises that make extensive use of their parents offerings. Which begs the question of how to this can be achieved and whether the parents are ready to push such “quasi independence”. From my view point there is little doubt that holding both these solution sets at arms length would help ensure visibility and value to potential customers and to the parent vendors alike. After all, just look at the success of VMware after its acquisition by EMC. There is also an opportunity for the respective parents to promote Altiris and Wily as much more “exciting” offerings than those with which they are traditionally associated.