As a result, both IT and business managers will have improved visibility into how their information systems deliver business services across physical and virtual environments, so managers can make better decisions to ensure availability and quality of service while improving agility and lowering the total cost of data center management.

The Managed Objects products complement and extend Novell’s existing workload management and virtualization solutions by adding flexible service modeling, leading Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) technology, advanced analytics and unique Web 2.0-based visualization technology. Customers can extract IT configuration and workload information in near real-time into a robust CMDB, model how the IT configuration provides business services, and then generate visualizations and dashboards that dynamically show how IT aligns to business services. By providing a single view of data center workloads across any physical or virtual environment, system administrators can understand and respond to issues in a business context reactively, pro-actively, or automatically.

Novell will acquire Managed Objects for an undisclosed sum using current cash. The acquisition is expected to close during Novell’s first fiscal quarter 2009 subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. Managed Objects will be fully integrated into Novell’s Systems and Resource Management business unit.