I think a lot of us are a bit nervous right now, but I’ll remain cautiously optimistic until we get more details…
A lot of us are nervous too – we know this will bring big changes and we can’t know ahead of time what they’ll be. But we fundamentally like dealing with change here at BigFix, so we can also get excited about the opportunity part of all these changes (the stuff Ben talks about – the resources of a larger company, the ability to go out to a lot more customers, the chance to integrate a whole lot of disparate IBM products into our “unified management platform”).
We love our product and we’re going to work hard to make sure that it continues to be awesome within the IBM fold. From our conversations with IBM people so far, they really seem to recognize our value and want the same thing (even if there are bound to be conflicts over things like our technology choices).
I just wanted to toss some more thoughts in since this thread is still alive and kicking:
We have talked a fair amount with IBM over the future of the BigFix platform and technology. I can tell you that one of the key reasons that IBM is interested in BigFix is because they believe our product is the best endpoint management product on the market and delivers the most customer value (I think that IBM will repeat this assertion even when it includes the endpoint management products that they currently offer). In all honesty, I don’t think many of us would have been interested in this deal unless we knew that it offered a bright future for all our hard work in the last 10+ years.
The first priority is to continue to build and distribute BigFix to more customers… and in fact we likely can accelerate some of our longer-term plans to build some of the very cool features that we were waiting to build until we had more development resources. There is some work we will need to do eventually to incorporate some IBM technologies and integrations, but I don’t think anyone will want to make any changes that will cause pain for customers or decrease the value of BigFix.
One more point is that BigFix is very good at incorporating other endpoint technologies into our platform (such as our Client Manager for Endpoint Protection, Trend Micro integration, Asset Discovery (NMAP), and so on) and there is a lot of potential to offer more new and interesting solutions based on the BigFix platform and other IBM products (which I think all you guys will enjoy since it is so easy to add new mastheads to your BigFix deployment).
IBM likes to offshore software developer positions outside the U.S. I hope this doesn’t happen as our economy is suffering enough as it is; we don’t need to lose more jobs.
I hope the optimism expressed by Bigfix pans out. As a large IBM customer, I wish I could say I share the enthusiasm. Beyond the marketing hype, our experience with Tivoli has been less than satisfying. Acquired products tend to either get diminished, watered down, lost, and/or vanish within the bowels of the gargantuan Tivoli machine. I’ve seen it happen with other IBM acquisitions. As rmnetops mentioned earlier, their per-core per-proc-type PVU licensing model is both miserable and expensive. Word to the wise … negotiate, renew, and lock-in terms now before the Tivoli licensing model kicks in!
Hoping for the best because I’m a fan of the product …
What??? I read that BigFix was bought for 400K by IBM. Are you kidding me? Was IBM wearing a mask and holding a gun? BigFix shoulda held out for 400B. I’ve used Tivoli and SMS and BigFix is far superior and more cost effective than either of those and I’d bet just about any other like product on the market. I can only hope that BigFix doesn’t get bastardized by the other evil empire. BigTiv? TivFix? Bigoli?
looking at those forums makes me want to weep. i can see us having to use tivoli enterprise console wiith ibm director agents all running in java virtual machines (ok, i’m not familiar with all the Tivoli products - for good reason). BARF.
I also wonder what pieces of BES will survive, since there is some overlap. Please let there be some regulatory hurdle that can’t be overcome.
I think you are looking at this the wrong way… IBM did not acquire our company and our technology so they could chop it up and destroy the nice parts of the product. It is actually quite the opposite. IBM acquired BigFix so that they could get access to an endpoint management product that customers love and then begin to integrate their products into BigFix (as opposed to the other way around).
My apologies, I’m a pessimist by nature. I’m glad to hear what the intentions are, but I won’t believe it until I see it. IBM’s track record is horrible when it comes to these types of deals.
In my view, they’ve moved most of their code to java based mostly on their hate of Microsoft and under the guise of it being platform agnostic (just make sure you’re running jre 1.5.10 and not 1.5.20 or 1.6 and of course have lots of memory and don’t leave the gui running too long or you can kiss that memory goodbye. What about the core os (linux?) and backend database (db2?). Again my glass half empty is rearing its head.
My half full glass would have been a partner like NetIQ, Solarwinds, ManageEngine, VMware… I’m sure others would have their own list.
One last thing I noticed is no mention of OS deployment or DSS SAM, but interestingly enough the mention the print monitor solution which isn’t even official (the last time we talked to BigFix anyhow).
I’ll keep quiet now and wait an see what happens. It will be interesting to see in hindsight how this all turns out. Thanks again for the additional info.
Well… I am still here (and so is the whole BigFix development and product management team) and I don’t think we plan on stopping innovating…
No one knows how the future will turn out, but I will note that we just released 8.0 along with our new version of Power Management, both of which contain major new features and innovations… so we are still going strong at the moment…
Maybe you will even like some of the new stuff we are working on now that we are plugged into a company with a lot more product resources…
