Platinum Technology Inc has landed the big one; an undisclosed equity investment from Intel Corp to seal a joint development, marketing and cross-licensing pact between the two firms which sees Platinum installed as the chip giant’s special partner for systems management technology. Spurred by criticism last year about the high cost of personal computer systems administration, Intel says the net result of the agreement will be products which enable organizations to better address management of unruly desktops and total cost of ownership issues. Under the deal, Platinum is to acquire and enhance the configuration services code in Intel’s LanDesk Configuration Manager for configuring desktops remotely or across the wire and will integrate it with a new release of its ProVision system and database management products by the middle of the year. Intel will license back the enhanced code, plus Platinum’s POEMS Platinum Open Enterprise Management Services integration technology and ProVision and integrate them within its LanDesk hardware monitoring and management suite. Platinum gets significant new channel revenue from Intel beginning in the current quarter and Intel will resell the Platinum software as part of its LanDesk product suite. This part of the arrangement is all the more interesting as LanDesk is OEMed by a raft of vendors including Platinum rival IBM Corp’s Tivoli Systems Inc. Furthermore Platinum will service and support new and existing Configuration Manager customers and new co- developed products will be marketed by both companies. Intel says Platinum will de-couple the Configuration Manager from hardware – it’s currently sold as part of a hardware/software solution – and describes the relationship between the two companies as grafting at the hip. The two say the enhanced Configuration Manager, at the heart of Intel’s LanDesk management suite and Wired for Management strategy, will be developed to work equally well Intel and compatible microprocessors as well as the variety of basic input/output system (BIOS) technologies which provide details of a PC system’s behavior, not only the Phoenix Technologies BIOS products used by Intel. Intel says it will continue its existing relationships with other management vendors including Tivoli and Computer Associates International Inc. While the value of Intel’s investment was not disclosed (for what it’s worth the amount is between $2m and $70m) the significance of the deal is a clear endorsement of Platinum’s self-styling as a new-generation systems management provider strategy and its shares put on $3.187 on the news to close at $27.187.
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