Part 4 of our four-part special on the year’s M&A activity in the industry. Read Part 1 on colocation M&A, Part 2 on M&A in hardware and Part 3 on acquisitions in the IT services space on our website.

In the Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) market, 2012 has so far seen lots of partnerships, but only one major acquisition.

According to IDC, however, further consolidation in the space is “inevitable”, since companies compete on the basis of comprehensiveness of their solutions.

The large vendors have already made their big DCIM acquisitions and developed them into vastly comprehensive offerings. Others have chosen to partner with each other and integrate offerings to cover a wider scope.

Schneider got its StruxureWare DCIM capabilities through the acquisition of American Power Conversion (APC) for US$6.1bn in 2006, and the roots of Emerson’s Trellis DCIM platform go back to its acquisition of Avocent for $1.2bn in 2009. Emerson has bought another company with a DCIM product, Aperture, for an undisclosed sum in 2008.

The one major acquisition with DCIM in mind that took place this year was Panduit’s August deal to buy UK’s Unite Technologies. The companies did not say how much money was involved, the deal gave Panduit’s DCIM  platform energy management, power, security and environmental monitoring capabilities.

Panduit’s offering consists of two products: the Physical Infrastructure Manager software platform and the PanView IQ hardware piece. The buyer said it would integrate Unite’s 6 Zone Data Center and Energy Management product with its DCIM offerings. (Read more about Panduit’s acquisition on page 49 and 51.)

Another recent acquisition in the DCIM space took place in December 2011, when Schneider bought Viridity Energy. Through this acquisition, Schneider’s StruxureWare for Data Center Operations DCIM suite gained the ability to automatically discover IT assets and optimize resource utilization at the IT level. Schneider did not say how much it shelled out for this capability.

Rather than buying new capabilities, many players decided to expand reach through partnerships, and 2012 saw many such deals.

Swiss giant ABB, for example, struck a deal with Silicon Valley-based nlyte, which focuses strictly on DCIM, whereby nlyte’s DCIM suite would be integrated into ABB’s Decathlon Data Center Enterprise Management product. The integration added capacity planning and business-process automation to Decathlon.

That deal was announced in February, the same month Power Assure and Raritan announced they would integrate their respective infrastructure management solutions into a single offering. In this deal Power Assure’s EM/4 Energy Management software would get power-use and temperature data feeds from Raritan’s branch-circuit monitoring solution and rack power distribution units (PDUs).

In another DCIM-software/PDU deal, ServerTech announced in January it would integrate firmware on its intelligent PDUs with IBM’s DCIM solution called Active Energy Manager. The manager monitors and manages power and temperature of IBM and non-IBM IT systems.

Not only do DCIM vendors strike partnerships to expand capabilities. They also partner to extend market reach. One example was a June partnership between SynapSense and Stulz, which brought SynapSense DCIM solution to Australian and New Zealand markets, where the German data center electrical-systems vendor is now a SynapSense reseller.

Partnerships seem to have been the preferred strategy for competing in the DCIM space this year. But that is not to say, we will not see more M&A activity in the space.

This article was originally published in the DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine, Issue 25. Subscribe for free on the DCD website.