Systems management company BMC Software on Monday said it intends to buy BladeLogic for $28 per share, or about $800 million net of cash acquired.
BladeLogic, which went public last year under the ticker BLOG, makes tools for automating jobs in data centers, such as configuring servers and provisioning storage appliances.
BMC said the software will be added to its existing product portfolio and bring it a "significant, high-growth revenue stream."
The acquisition comes at the tail end of a wave of consolidation in the data center software field, which started out earlier this decade.
With the growing complexity of data centers for running public Web sites or corporations, IT professionals need productivity tools to manage their operations.
Last July, Hewlett-Packard said it would spend $1.6 billion to buy data center automation firm Opsware, a company founded by Marc Andreesen. Several other smaller companies with niche tools have been bought by other hardware providers, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, and EMC.
Update: In an interview, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and BladeLogic CEO Dev Ittycheria said the combination of the two companies will create an integrated suite of products that will allow IT professionals to more quickly install and change applications.
Beauchamp said the vision is to allow people to provision applications in minutes, a task that sometimes can take months.
"The ability to have this closed-loop model for break/fix and change reconciliation is a powerful concept," Ittycheria said.