BMC Monday said it has acquired privately held MQSoftware, the Minneapolis outfit that does middleware and enterprise application transaction management. Terms were not disclosed.

It's BMC's very first mainframe-related acquisition and it says it'll be the first time that the enterprises using both mainframe and distributed systems will have a unified solution for managing cross-platform messaging middleware and corresponding transaction management from a single console.

The acquisition will expand BMC's Business Service Management platform, which already gives users a view of their mainframe and distributed systems, to include their entire middleware infrastructure and high-value transactions.

BMC sees IT departments monitoring, diagnosing and addressing middleware and business transaction issues in silos without the context of the enterprise as a whole, which, it says, leads to increased costs, wasted skills and lost time. Its cross-enterprise solution is supposed to provide the critical context, leading to fewer service disruptions and quicker resolutions when problems do occur.

Since MQSoftware was a BMC partner, its transaction monitoring product is already integrated into BMC's mainframe transaction solution. The acquisition is supposed to result in a scalable, proven and complete WebSphere MQ monitoring solution.

A recent BMC survey showed that 92% of large IT shops use WebSphere MQ middleware to help deliver the business services while 66% of IT shops in general reported using WebSphere MQ as a crucial part of their IT infrastructure.

With the acquisition, BMC says it will be able to reduce user costs up to 30% by eliminating monitoring silos for transactions and messaging middleware; reduce downtime 90% or more by unifying transaction and messaging middleware performance monitoring across platforms and technologies; and improve staff productivity up to 40% by simplifying management tasks.

MQSoftware claims a thousand customers in banking, insurance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, and government.