The IT market research and analyst firm 451 Group has announced the acquisition of the Uptime Instituite - a Santa Fe, N.M.-based research organization that focuses on the data center industry and provides data center consulting services.

The Institute's founder Ken Brill will step down from his leadership position and will instead act in the role of the organization's global spokesman and provide "strategic guidance," 451 said in a statement. The Group's CEO Martin McCarthy will serve as the Institute's chairman and Pitt Turner, who has been running the Institute's Professional Services business, will act as the organization's new executive director.

"The 451 Group provides the perfect home for Uptime," Brill said in a statement. "Its reputation for independence aligns well with the Institute's credo of vendor neutrality."

In 2008, Brill won the Outstanding Contribution award at DatacenterDynamics' Leadership Awards.

"The Uptime Institute has a global reputation for integrity, independence and innovation in the areas of data center availability - uptime - and IT energy efficiency," McCarthy said in the statement. "For almost two decades, the proprietary insights of Uptime have served the most demanding data center end-user organizations, including most Fortune 100 companies, as well as leading US government organizations."

The Institute is most famous for creating the four-tier classification system for data center redundancy. Since its introduction, the system has enjoyed widespread acceptance by the industry, though many industry professionals - including Uptime itself - acknowledge a need to update it for finer granularity.

Besides Brill and Turner, the Institute has 25 staff members who will now join the 85-member 451 Group. The Group owns another IT research organization - Tier 1 Research - which it bought in 2005.