IBM is bulking up its storage software division by buying privately held storage resource management firm, Novus Consulting Group (NovusCG). Financial terms were not disclosed.

NovusCG sells two pieces of software. The flagship product is Storage Enterprise Resource Planner (SERP). The software creates reports pulled from monitoring services such as EMC ControlCenter, HP Storage Essentials, HDS HSSM and NetApp Operations Manager.

The company's other product, Enterprise Standardization Program (ESP), uses a Wiki engine to guide employees through a company's operational procedures of storage management.

NovusCG has been around since 2000, with just about 100 employees on deck. It claims (undisclosed) customers in commercial industry sectors, but is willing to throw out a couple government agency names who use them — such as the US Securities and Exchange Commission, US Department of Defense, US Department of Homeland Security, and so forth.

The business is expected to be absorbed into IBM's Storage and Data Services Unit, although it's unclear how many of the staff are coming along for the ride.

IBM said the technology will complementcore System Storage disk and tape products for optimizing storage tiers. NovusCG will also be integrated into IBM's Total Productivity Center, Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Storage Process Manager, SAN Volume Controller and the rest of the System Storage portfolio.

IBM currently lags behind EMC and Symantec in worldwide storage software revenues, according to market analyst group, IDC. EMC holds 24.6 per cent of the market, Symantec 17.5 per cent, and IBM drums up 13 per cent. ®