BMC Software will next week introduce a new strategy and products
aimed at helping customers measure IT performance by giving a
clearer picture of shifting infrastructure, mainframe and IT
resources collected across an enterprise.
Patrol Perceive, a new entry-level, Web-based tool that takes 20
minutes to install, will be released next week as the first of
BMC's new Enterprise Performance Assurance line. The product
features out-of-the-box clientless customisable Web views by
domain, system, dates and metrics for collected performance details
from servers and applications, according to David Wagner, BMP
director of product management and development of enterprise
performance assurance.
"The biggest thing driving our business right now is server
consolidation," said Wagner. "Either [customers] are doing it or
they're being ordered to investigate it. They have too much
capacity and they need to lower costs."
Wagner said the new product supports Windows and Unix platforms and
will be extended to other data sources in future releases. Patrol
Perceive can export data to XML, Microsoft Excel, PDF, CSV and
other printer-friendly formats.
Two other products will be available by the end of September: BMC's
Mainview Performance Assurance v1.3 will push predictive analysis,
modelling, and service-level agreement management for OS/390 and
applications to include virtual machine partitions running on Linux
on zSeries.
BMC will also launch Patrol for iSeries - Predict. The product aims
to predict the impact of change, and thus reduce or prevent service
problems from occurring, on iSeries responsiveness and AS/400
operations, Wagner said.
Curtailed IT spending is forcing customers to assess what is
running their environment and try to squeeze out maximum efficiency
to increase service level management, said Stephen Elliot, research
director at Hurwitz Group.
"The criticality of IT infrastructure is only increasing and if you
can't see what's going on, you definitely can't manage it. When you
can't manage it, the chances of downtime are much higher," said
Elliot. "People are realising 'let's figure out what we have and
what we can get out of it'."
As network and application monitoring solutions becomes more
commoditised, Elliot said that end-users are starting to focus
their attention on areas tightly linked with business processes
such as integration, services-on-demand, and storage management
within a holistic view.
Pricing for Patrol Perceive starts at $20 (£13) for Windows and $49
(£32) for Unix desktops. Mainview Performance Assurance will start
at $3,900 (£2,512) and Patrol for iSeries - Predict will be priced
from $350 (£225) when it launches.