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Indicative 6.0 Released: Designed To Simplify Enterprise IT Management
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2004-08-16
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Indicative Software Inc. today announced availability of Indicative 6.0, the latest version of its enterprise IT management software.
Indicative 6.0 is easily and rapidly implemented, providing the fast time to value for IT management software. Made possible by an extensive and patented template library, Indicative 6.0 contains comprehensive knowledge for managing the vast majority of hardware, software and services within a wide array of unique IT environments and conditions. When coupled with the software's powerful modeling capabilities, these templates eliminate the need for the types of expensive and time-consuming toolkits that conventional management vendors deploy. As well, the highly flexible and scalable design of Indicative's templates make it easy to tailor the software as IT architecture changes occur.
Debra Curtis, Gartner Research Vice President, IT Operations Management, stated: "IT operations departments should consider themselves service organizations that adapt to a constant stream of requirements from business units. Therefore, managing IT services is critical to the success of IT operations. It enables operations departments to define, deliver and manage the end-to-end IT services that business units require -- services that provide measurable business value."
Unlike other management software solutions, Indicative 6.0 is not a collection or aggregation of point-products, but a single product that meets management needs involving typical heterogeneous IT environments. In addition, Indicative 6.0's heterogeneous capabilities enable customers to leverage previous management software investments, making 6.0 the most cost-effective path for managing today's increasingly complex IT environments.
The latest version includes new templates for proactive monitoring of Windows, J2EE, and WebLogic application server environments for early resolution of IT performance and availability problems with those ever-increasingly pervasive platforms. Just as with Indicative's UNIX capability, IT managers can solve issues as they occur and prevent problems from impacting customer interactions or business processes in these popular application server environments.
"We're continuing to provide unprecedented management capabilities that break down the conventional paradigm of management," said Tilman Schad, CEO of Indicative. "Indicative's top-down view of IT measures service health relative to the health of the underlying infrastructure that supports delivery of the service. With this view, problems are solved proactively and faster, enabling more effective prioritization of resources and the ability to accurately anticipate how IT performance will impact business."
Templates and Modeling: The Crown Jewels
Indicative's patented modeling and template library are critical aspects of the software's out-of-the-box ability to swiftly gain visibility into heterogeneous, distributed enterprise IT environments and to rapidly respond to change.
The templates in Indicative 6.0 include cascading auto-discovery engines that peel back multiple layers of the infrastructure in order to gain highly relevant intelligence and visibility. The templates include intelligence about components of an infrastructure such as technology properties, best-practice tests, measurements, baselines, recommended thresholds, relevant reports, data storage duration, and data export information. When coupled with Indicative's modeling capability, the templates can determine inherent inter-dependencies between IT components as well as detect and incorporate changes on the fly. Conventional management tools rely on IT staff to identify additional IT components and customize monitoring parameters, while Indicative's approach is automatic -- saving countless hours of costly implementation and ongoing administrative time.
No other management software vendor compares to Indicative's comprehensive and flexible approach to monitoring using such encapsulated knowledge and best practices of the industry.
Jean-Pierre Garbani, Forrester Research VP and Research Director, wrote, "Many processes in use today for the management of IT infrastructures follow the initial model of technology silo expertise, and this trend is amplified by the management products available on the market, which tend to address specific infrastructure areas with little or no cross-domain intelligence." ("Best Practices for Business Service Management", Forrester Research, September 2003)
Windows Monitoring
Supplementing the breadth of Indicative's 5.3 monitoring capabilities, Indicative 6.0 adds new Windows templates to take advantage of the near-ubiquitous Microsoft Performance Monitor (PerfMon). Indicative's Windows monitoring templates can access the hundreds of Windows status and performance metrics that may be used to track every aspect of Windows enterprise system health. It does so by using non-proprietary, "agentless" technology as opposed to using software agents that add cost every time a component is added, are one-dimensional in capabilities, and require constant tailoring and maintenance of the management software. Indicative's approach mitigates the need to store local device data in log files, making it possible to aggregate the data in one place and in context of activities such as capacity planning.
J2EE Application Management
Indicative also adds templates to proactively measure performance and availability of any Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application including Siebel, PeopleSoft and other off-the-shelf or homegrown applications. Designed for application administrators, J2EE application specialists, QA professionals and developers, Indicative provides out-of-the-box templates for application breakdown and troubleshooting at the Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) level.
When using Indicative's J2EE tests coupled with proactive user experience transaction tests and active data collection, Indicative finds performance issues before customers do. If there is a problem, performance degradation can be swiftly correlated to the underlying problem and resolved. Since performance data is stored within an embedded database, Indicative makes capacity planning, reporting and trend analysis an easy task.
Pricing and Availability
Indicative 6.0 is currently available. Typical small-to-medium sized business installations start at $50,000 while large corporate enterprise installations typically start at $100,000. This pricing includes implementation and first year service support.
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