EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information management and storage, today announced the acquisition of privately held nLayers – a leader in application discovery and mapping software. The acquisition further expands EMC’s resource management portfolio, enhancing EMC Smarts’ ability to conduct automated comprehensive root-cause and impact analysis across all technology domains – including networks, applications and storage. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on revenues or EPS for 2006.

nLayers provides an agentless appliance that automatically identifies, maps and models the relationships and interdependencies between applications, servers and devices in a time-based, behavioral model. The technology is based on Application Behavior Modeling (ABM), a patent-pending technology that continuously discovers and monitors application components, resource dependencies, service levels and usage within data centers. nLayers is the industry’s first complete configuration management database (CMDB) infrastructure solution – combining award-winning discovery and application dependency mapping capabilities with reconciliation, federation, analytics and dashboards.

As part of a recently announced OEM agreement, nLayers already provides the foundation technology for EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager software – providing necessary insight into application behavior and all interdependencies with the IT infrastructure. This comprehensive understanding of the application environment and its interdependencies serves as the foundation and catalyst for more extensive application and infrastructure monitoring, analysis and automation across the enterprise – driving lower operating costs, faster mean-time-to-repair and enhanced reliability of core business services.

Over time, nLayers will better enable EMC storage management software to intelligently correlate, determine root-cause and present a plan of action for critical problems across the entire IT infrastructure. An important attribute of information lifecycle management (ILM) is the uninterrupted flow and movement of information. The health, well-being and management of the information network will serve as a cornerstone for any comprehensive ILM strategy.

Chris Gahagan, Senior Vice President, Resource Management, EMC Software Group, said, “EMC’s acquisition of nLayers is all about continued market penetration, complementary technology and growth. nLayers provides us with a highly strategic and complementary technology – further extending EMC Smarts’ correlation and analysis capabilities into the applications domain. EMC is fully committed to applying the resources necessary to continue to grow nLayers’ market penetration and leadership. As we share complementary technology visions, we firmly believe EMC will fully empower nLayers with the broad-based financial and technical resources to realize its full market potential.”

Gili Raanan, nLayers Founder, President and CEO, said, “This acquisition is a significant win for both companies’ customers. As application, network and storage domains continue to converge and become more complex, companies require insight into the behavior of these domains and how they drive core business services. Together, EMC and nLayers technologies will provide customers with a more powerful solution for managing their IT infrastructure information throughout the entire lifecycle.”

Gahagan added, “To fully automate incident management and triage, and to gain the flexibility necessary to adapt to their changing technology environments, IT professionals require insight into the dynamic and often complex applications domain. Only then can they fully automate incident management and triage, and gain the flexibility necessary to adapt to their changing technology environments. The combination of EMC and nLayers technology provides that solution.”

nLayers will become a part of EMC’s Resource Management Software Group, with the EMC Resource Management sales team along with existing nLayers partners focused on selling nLayers solutions. Additionally, nLayers’ Israel-based R&D operation will contribute to the overall efforts of EMC’s recently created Israel Software Development Center. EMC is committed to further investing in Israel, expanding its R&D team there and benefiting from Israel’s top talent and innovative engineers. The financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.