Navigating inside the cloud at Microsoft in the future will include some support from the Triangle.

BlueStripe Software, a Morrisville-based developer of application management software that launched in 2007, is now part of Microsoft. The tech giant disclosed the acquisition Wednesday in a blog post. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Mike Neil, general manager of Enterprise Cloud for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), says BlueStripe’s technology will help Microsoft customers “improve application visibility and management across the datacenter and cloud.”

“BlueStripe’s solution helps map, monitor and troubleshoot distributed applications across heterogeneous operating systems and multiple datacenter and cloud environments,” Neil wrote.

“BlueStripe is commonly used today by customers to extend the value of Microsoft System Center by adding application-aware infrastructure performance monitoring.”

In a note to customers, BlueStripe’s CEO Chris Neal and the firm’s co-founders said Microsoft was no stranger to the company:

“We are very excited to announce that Microsoft has acquired BlueStripe Software

We’ve worked with Microsoft for years – they’ve been a great customer, a technology supporter, and IT management partner. Going forward, you will see BlueStripe’s technology play an even more important role as new data center and cloud solutions come to market. We are thrilled with the opportunity to be part of the next wave of IT innovation.

“When we founded BlueStripe Software, our goal was to give IT Operations teams a way to discover, map, and monitor their complex application infrastructure. The need for real-time accurate visibility into the structure and performance of applications has increased greatly, requiring visibility across the Data Center and in the Cloud.

“Our customers needed to manage increasingly complex environments incorporating different operating systems, multiple locations, all while increasing their use of the Cloud. We are proud to have delivered the best Hybrid Cloud management solution in the industry incorporating Discovery, Mapping, and Monitoring together in one tool.”

Tools for the cloud wars

BlueStripe is part of Microsoft’s ongoing cloud strategy as it competes with Amazon, IBM, RackSpace and other big cloud providers. A recent study ranked Microsoft second behind Amazon in market share.

“As evidenced through our recent announcements such as Microsoft Azure Stack, OMS, Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, Microsoft is committed to providing leading hybrid cloud solutions and support for our customers.,” Neil said. “Today’s acquisition furthers that promise, giving IT even more hybrid cloud flexibility to focus on what matters most – rapidly delivering business value to drive innovation.”

  • Who is BlueStripe?

As definied at its website:

BlueStripe helps IT Operations teams map, monitor, and fix their distributed applications. BlueStripe’s FactFinder software monitors many of the world’s most critical applications. Enterprise IT teams use the software to detect and fix bottlenecks before users are affected. With FactFinder, they can track transactions anywhere they go—across the datacenter and the cloud. BlueStripe provides extensive integration with Microsoft System Center, providing dynamic application maps, service level alerting, and performance dashboards within Operations Manager, and service level alerting and business services for Orchestrator and Service Manager.

So why buy BlueStripe?

“More and more, businesses are turning to applications to drive innovation and gain competitive advantage. To support this explosion of applications, agile cloud development environments and more componentized architectures and micro-services are growing exponentially,” he explained. “Applications and data are being spread across on-premises datacenters and public, private and hosted clouds as a result. While IT teams may not operate all of the infrastructure where the applications run, they still require visibility and the ability to manage these applications in order to support and protect the business.”

And here’s where BlueStripe comes in:

“BlueStripe’s enterprise-class solution enables IT professionals to move from monitoring IT at the infrastructure level to gaining visibility into applications at the transaction level. The technology discovers and maps applications and dependencies, pinpoints problems for faster resolution, and helps maintain SLAs across complex underlying infrastructure. By mapping the structure of distributed applications, BlueStripe also helps in the process of updating applications to more modern platforms and migrating to the cloud.”

So what’s next? Incorporating the BlueStripe team and technology.

“Now that we have welcomed BlueStripe employees into the Microsoft family, we will be hard at work making BlueStripe’s solution an integral part of Microsoft’s management products and services, like System Center and Operations Management Suite (OMS),” Neil said.

“We will discontinue selling the BlueStripe solutions in the near term while we work on these updates, although we will continue to support existing BlueStripe customers during this time.”