Everyone knows the big four auditors (Deloitte, Ernst&Young, KPMG, PWC) for a long time. In recent times, while our favourite topic becomes more important from week to week, there are the IT Service management big four aka BMC, CA, HP and IBM (alphabetical order!).

As Erin Joyce on enterprisestorageforum.com describes <here> EMC is integrating two solutions they acquired in recent years (Smarts in 2005 and Voyence 2007). Voyence Control is a solution for Automated Configuration and Change Management, while EMC Smarts is a solution for fault isolation and root cause analysis. In combination with the in 2006 acquired nLayers solution for Application Discovery, which is now labelled as EMCs ADM (Application Discovery Manager), it looks like they added ITSM and BSM (Business Service Management) to their interesting product portfolio.

So if I were Cisco and had 45bn$ to spend, I definitly would take a deep look into EMC. I guess together with Cisco, we would see the Big Five.

Roland