BMC Software said Monday it has signed a deal to buy London startup Tideway Systems, which makes software for tracking and analyzing IT system components. Terms of the deal, which is expected to be concluded this week, were not disclosed.

Tideway’s Foundation product builds a map of a company’s applications and the underlying infrastructure that supports them. Customers can use the information to spot risks, eliminate wasted resources and recover more quickly from incidents, according to the company.

BMC and Tideway are long-time partners and the latter’s software will work in concert with BMC’s Atrium Configuration Management Database, according to a statement.

The pending acquisition is just the latest in a series of deals around the BSM (business service management) space, where BMC competes with CA, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compuware and a range of smaller vendors.

Rather than simply alert IT managers to isolated problems, BSM is meant to track technology system performance according to its impact on business processes and services.

In September, CA announced plans to buy network and application monitoring vendor NetQos for US$200 million, and earlier this month, Compuware said it would spend $295 million to acquire Gomez, maker of technology for monitoring Web applications.