4/21/2009 -- With the acquisition of Tidal Software Inc., Cisco simultaneously burnished its datacenter bona-fides and beefed up its still-coalescing Unified Computing System (UCS) strategy.

Furthermore, experts say the acquisition of Tidal, which develops job scheduling and datacenter automation software, is an important one for Cisco, in as much as it dispenses with an all-too-obvious shortcoming on Cisco's part.

"At [last month's UCS] launch, Cisco...announced partnerships with various vendors that would provide automation and IT operations solutions within the UCS environment. But Cisco still lacked tools and solutions to manage application performance or batch automation in that environment. It also lacked a dedicated business unit to oversee its datacenter automation strategy," wrote Gartner analysts Milind Govekar and David Williams in a research blast.

Aside from plugging a glaring gap in Cisco's UCS portfolio, the Tidal acquisition confers several additional benefits, Govekar and Williams said. For starters, it permits Cisco to "create a focused datacenter automation business unit within its Advanced Services organization that would manage Cisco's IT operations software and partnerships with other vendors." Secondly, the acquisition lets Cisco extend marketing strategy beyond the network -- specifically, into application management inside the datacenter.

"[The acquisition lets Cisco] extend Tidal's application management technology into a Software as a Service offering and use Tidal's process automation capability to implement application-specific best practices...[as well as] use Tidal's job-scheduling tools to implement batch automation within the datacenter," Govekar and Williams added.

Of course, Tidal's successful assimilation is far from a fait accompli.

"Cisco must establish itself among a new customer base as a credible player in the application management market. Although Tidal employees will transition into the new business unit, Tidal had a limited installed base, experience and head count in this area," the analysts said. In addition, they stressed, "Cisco must assure Tidal's traditional job-scheduling/batch automation customers -- which comprise the majority of its installed base -- that [it] will continue to provide scheduling capabilities for a heterogeneous environment." --Stephen Swoyer