Business service management tools vendor BMC has announced its intention to acquire Tideway Systems, a systems monitoring technology supplier that originated in the UK. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed.

Tideway’s Foundation tool examines an organisation’s infrastructure and ‘discovers’ all the component devices and their configuration. This ensures the accuracy of the configuration management database (CMDB), the central record of the IT estate that is commonly considered the foundation upon which IT service management and business service management can be built. Foundation will be integrated into BMC’s Atrium CMDB offering.

The deal follows a spate of acquisitions in the IT / business service management arena, such as CA’s $200 million purchase of network performance monitoring vendor NetQoS in September 2009.

It is possible that this acquisition activity comes in anticipation of software giant Oracle’s roundabout entry into the BSM space. Last week, the company revealed that it would in future be collecting its customer’s configuration data in a central repository – essentially a giant CMDB in ‘the cloud’. It also said it would be upgrading its Enterprise Manager application management tool-set to allow IT departments to monitor application infrasructure performance in terms of business-defined service level agreements. Both of these functions are tenets of BSM.