Business information and storage specialist EMC (NYSE: EMC) has been making quite a bit of news lately, following up a slew of announcements from EMC World 2012 conference. The latest: EMC has acquired Watch4Net Solutions, a performance management software company.

Watch4Net provides real-time, historical and projected visibility into network, data center and cloud infrastructure performance. The two companies have worked together over the last seven years to offer IT management solutions; Watch4Net leverages EMC’s topology awareness, instrumentation and management console and is already integrated with EMC’s Ionix IT Operations Intelligence Suite (ITOI).

Watch4Net’s flagship product, the APG Software Suite, is a performance and SLA management solution to monitor in real-time the performance of IP networks, mobile networks, data centers and clouds.

Michel Foix, Watch4net CEO, and the Watch4net team will report to Jay Mastaj, senior vice president and general manager of EMC’s Infrastructure Management Group. EMC, which paid cash to acquire the company, declined to provide a specific sum.

Regardless of where customers are along their journey to the cloud, insight into every aspect of IT performance and the ability to manage it is becoming increasingly important, particularly when it comes to critical business application performance, Mastaj said in a company release.

The move broadens EMC’s ever-expanding IT management portfolio, which not only includes ITOI but also Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) for managing VCE Vblock platforms and Watch4net, as well as alignment with IT Service Level Management via VMware and Security Management and Compliance via RSA. And let’s not forget its recent partnership with Brocade to automate the management of joint EMC and Brocade storage area networking (SAN) environments.