Although IBM had a small stake in the 2-year-old company, IBM opted to bring it fully into the fold to help customers unify different IT groups such as developers and administrators, according to LeBlanc, who was tapped earlier this week to be GM of the WebSphere unit.

"The need for end-to-end application management capabilities, where you have tools that can address the needs of developers, testers, administrators and the operations team, is becoming increasingly more important," LeBlanc said. "Right now, customers don't have a common taxonomy across those disparate groups."

The Cyanea One technology, sold Thursday by IBM under the name IBM WebSphere Studio Application Monitor, monitors and manages performance of multitiered Web applications based on J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition).

Click here to read about Sun's partners and rivals announcing compatibility with J2EE.

In addition to managing Java applications running on IBM WebSphere as well as on BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic Web application servers, Cyanea One also manages the performance of IBM mainframe-based CICS (Customer Information Control System) and IMS (Information Management Software). It speeds troubleshooting and diagnosis of performance problems and gathers performance data for trend analysis.

IBM intends to sell the software under its Rational as well as Tivoli and WebSphere brands.

IBM is planning tighter integration of the Cyanea technology into the Tivoli Event Console and the Tivoli Business Systems Management software, so that customers will have a common method of interaction with management software across servers, networks and applications, LeBlanc said.

IBM's acquisition follows a string of acquisitions of smaller companies focused on multitiered application management, according to Tim Grieser, an analyst with International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass.

Cyanea CEO James Chong will transition to IBM to head up a new group charged specifically with developing application management technologies. The new group will take responsibility for Cyanea, Candle Pathway and Tivoli Transaction Monitoring product development. Those tools will be bundled together initially.

"We're combining it all together and asking James to take the application management space and build out a next-generation platform," LeBlanc said. "We needed close engineering collaboration to do that."

The combination of developers for those IBM tools with the 75 employees from Cyanea will more than double the size of the application management team, according to Chong, who will remain in Oakland, Calif., with the other Cyanea employees.

IBM would not disclose the terms of the agreement, which has been completed.

This article was first published on eweek.com.