When VMWare was forced into buying the EMC RMSG group, they took on board a whole bunch of disparate software suites they didn't know what to do with.

Perhaps some history might help. EMC originally decided that as they were able to buy a lot of other storage companies and make these acquisitions work, they would do the same thing to be known as leaders in the "enterprise management" space - all so they could sell more storage.

The market apparently was screaming out for a CMDB at the time, so their first acquisition was System Management Arts (SMARTS), which handled event management quite cleverly. Only... it didn't populate the CMDB as well as the market wanted, so EMC then decided to purchase nLayers, which was a network discovery appliance. Then they realised that network discovery alone does not make a CMDB. With this insight, they decided to buy infra, an Australian company that did IT Service Management, with a particular focus around the ITIL framework.

Well what do you know, but Infra might do workflows and ticketing, but it doesn't actually control or automate actual configuration management. Thusly, they decided to remedy this by shortly thereafter purchasing Voyence.

They actually bought a few more companies, but these were the main four.

So at this point, you have at least four separate products, all developed on different architectures with different goals in mind, each of which wasn't talking to each other very well. SMARTS has its own proprietary scripting language and is built on a Java front end, with hooks into Perl. nLayers is a network appliance that runs on some sort of RedHat distribution and is put together with Perl, Apache, tcpdump and an inbuilt Oracle server. infra is a Windows based system that was, when they bought it, only jst running on .NET 2.0 and IIS, with SQL Server and Oracle back ends, with a front end based on (ugh) ActiveX. And Voyence... Well, not rightly sure what Voyence is built on.

In other words, totally different development teams, all basically startups that were dynamic and successful in their own right, each having been shoe-horned into a massive hardware company that has no real clue about software or how to develop or support it, and each largely under the radar of the larger EMC.

So they decide to write some "glue" software to allow all the discovery software to talk to each other. They call this DataCentre Insight (DCI). They have high hopes to do something, allow for mashups and REST based APIs.

Well, this doesn't work. There are a lot of disgruntled employees because the RMSG group is so poorly run. A lot of these companies aren't based in Boston (in fact, they are often in different countries), but Boston decides it knows better how to run the companies. As is the way of these things, the clueless managers start strangling the life out of the smaller companies. Eventually, the guy who went on an acquisition spree, he "leaves".

A new guy comes in. He decides to base the group around Infra, and rebadges all the product names to "Ionix" (rumour has it the original name was something else - Urinix - but Joe Tucci looked at in Word, found spell-checker came up with "urinate" as a suggestion and promptly nixed it). All brand awareness was dumped, nobody knew what suite was what and it was a marketing disaster.

So then DCI was dumped, things kept going downhill, and eventually the new guy, along with another higher up brought in to fix the mess that was Ionix, stitched up a deal to foist the Ionix suite onto VMware. Of course, they keep SMARTS! Probably the best of the bunch because they needed it for certain storage technologies, like ControlCentre.

Well, the VMware guys can't have been too impressed, especially given some of thir new offerings were going to overlap (such as with AppSpeed).

After this point, no idea what happened. It was basically a big mess, caused by stupidity, cultural arrogance by a massive hardware company where cronyism was rife and innovation struggled. But it was largely caused by EMC management.

There are, of course, a lot of other products in the VMware stable, but this should give you some insight into how EMC interferes in VMware. It's a pity, VMWare is a good company!