On 13 February 2009, Oracle acquired mValent, an IT service dependency mapping (DM) and application configuration management vendor.

This acquisition is part of an ongoing strategy to enhance Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). mValent will add to OEM the ability to discover and model end-to-end application configuration dependencies that can be used for application configuration visualization as well as detecting and remediating configuration drift. In addition, mValent offers code and configuration settings deployment. mValent technology will aid Oracle customers in making more successful changes and in identifying problematic configuration drift. In the longer term, Oracle will use the technology to aid customers in comparing their configurations to best practices and in its support organization to provide swifter analysis and recommendations for Oracle's application configurations. We believe Oracle will focus on keeping mValent up to date for Oracle applications (including third-party components) but will also continue to give customers extensibility for other vendors' applications.

Along with seven other IT service DM vendors, most of which have been acquired, mValent entered the market about five years ago, but differentiated itself by the depth of application-specific configuration discovery as well as remediation. DM vendors offer the ability to discover peer-to-peer and hierarchical relationships in complex application environments. mValent adds end-to-end application stack capabilities to OEM, which today reports on a server-by-server basis. While mValent can make configuration changes to application settings and deploy Java Platform, Enterprise Edition code, Oracle plans to continue to leverage OEM's provisioning capability contained in OEM Provisioning Pack for Middleware, and thus will likely discontinue these features from mValent in the long term.

• Current mValent customers: Expect Oracle to continue support for mValent, but in the longer term expect it will be subsumed by OEM. If you are not an Oracle customer, you will have to evaluate Oracle's road map and potentially need to evaluate alternative vendors, including BMC, CA, EMC, HP, IBM, Symantec and Tideway Systems. Those using mValent for code deployment should evaluate Oracle's road map, and if it will not meet future needs, evaluate alternatives such as BMC, Interwoven and Phurnace.
• Oracle customers: Assess Oracle's road map for mValent technology, and decide whether it matches your requirements and the breadth of your non-Oracle environment. If not, evaluate alternatives.
• OEM users that require IT service DM capability: Evaluate mValent and alternatives, but expect Oracle's mValent integration with OEM to be better.
• IT organizations looking for IT service DM outside of Oracle applications: Evaluate alternatives.

• "Vendor Landscape: Server Provisioning and Configuration Management” — With vendors offering everything from point functions to a full life cycle of capabilities, it is important to understand how the server provisioning and configuration management vendor landscape is segmented. By Ronni Colville and Donna Scott
• "Selection Criteria for IT Service Dependency Mapping Vendors” — IT service dependency mapping tools offer a unique technology approach to solving the difficult problem of discovery for IT service relationships. We discuss the players, differentiators and factors to consider for selection criteria. By Patricia Adams and Ronni Colville

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