Levanta, a Linux data center automation company that was reborn from the ashes of Linuxcare, has closed its doors.
Levanta, which laid off the bulk of its 20 or so employees on Monday, is now seeking to sell the assets of the company, said a Levanta investor.
"Levanta won't continue as a standalone company, but we hope to find a home for its technology soon," said the investor. "Levanta has the best technology for managing Linux servers...but we couldn't wait for the market to develop. In the U.S., there's only a 10 percent penetration rate for Linux data centers."
The company's closure comes less than six months after it received an $8 million round of venture funding. That funding round was designed to accelerate the company's move into Linux data center automation. Previously, Levanta was focused on Linux management and data virtualization.
Levanta was created in 2004, rising from the demise of Linux operating system services company Linuxcare. The former Linuxcare used to offer a product called Levanta, which was designed to make it easier to run Linux on IBM mainframe computers.
Over the four years that Levanta operated, it raised more than $10 million in venture funding.
And, so, while Levanta as an independent company now ceases to exist, its technology may get its third home soon. Keep an eye out for the phoenix to rise again.
Systems management company BMC Software on Monday said it intends to buy BladeLogic for $28 per share, or about $800 million net of cash acquired.
BladeLogic, which went public last year under the ticker BLOG, makes tools for automating jobs in data centers, such as configuring servers and provisioning storage appliances.
BMC said the software will be added to its existing product portfolio and bring it a "significant, high-growth revenue stream."
The acquisition comes at the tail end of a wave of consolidation in the data center software field, which started out earlier this decade.
With the growing complexity of data centers for running public Web sites or corporations, IT professionals need productivity tools to manage their operations.
Last July, Hewlett-Packard said it would spend $1.6 billion to buy data center automation firm Opsware, a company founded by Marc Andreesen. Several other smaller companies with niche tools have been bought by other hardware providers, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, and EMC.
Update: In an interview, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and BladeLogic CEO Dev Ittycheria said the combination of the two companies will create an integrated suite of products that will allow IT professionals to more quickly install and change applications.
Beauchamp said the vision is to allow people to provision applications in minutes, a task that sometimes can take months.
"The ability to have this closed-loop model for break/fix and change reconciliation is a powerful concept," Ittycheria said.
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