Portera Chooses BMC for SLA Monitoring

BMC Software Inc. (Nasdaq: BMCS), the leading provider of ebusiness systems management, announced Monday (Jan 29) that Portera, a leading Vertical Service Provider (VSP) dedicated to serving the professional services industry, has chosen BMC Software’s solutions for service level management to assure the availability of its new subscription-based offerings.

Portera chose BMC Software’s PATROL solutions for its performance management capabilities which provide current and historic performance analysis and allows them to better communicate to their customers on service levels and performance being delivered. Portera’s new solutions are built on an integrated suite of Professional Service Automation (PSA) applications.

The solutions are tailored to meet the needs of the professional services industry and will now be offered on a subscription basis. BMC Software’s solutions provide the ability to assure the availability of Portera’s applications and that service level agreements (SLA) are met across Portera’s customer base. With BMC Software’s monitoring solutions, Portera will have better visibility into day-to-day systems performance and be able to scale its environment to support increased sales.

“We invest a great deal of time and effort to ensure performance, availability and an optimized user experience,” said Nathan Carter, director of Site Operations at Portera. “Full-circle system management tools are now in place. With the addition of BMC’s solutions, we can now say we cover the network, the system layer, the end-user experience, SLAs and the whole gambit around monitoring. At Portera we understand that monitoring is actually managing the environment from the customer’s perspective. Adding BMC to our existing suite of tools allows us to do that.”

Portera completed an extensive evaluation of BMC Software’s solutions, including a demo in its environment to test functionality, overhead and performance. “The greatest factor in selecting BMC’s Solutions was the monitoring and the ease of use. Usability of the interface was intuitive so we could acclimate to it more quickly. Also, we’re targeting customizing around the customer’s viewpoint of their perspective so that we can in essence meet their SLA,” added Carter.

Portera offers a broad range of application and outsourcing services designed specifically for professional services organizations. These web-driven solutions streamline business processes to help maximize revenue opportunities and enhance client service. Portera combines a suite of zero-infrastructure, web-hosted applications and outsourcing services.

Portera’s applications are custom configured to fit professional services businesses such as technology consulting firms, management consulting firms, professional services organizations, interactive agencies, advertising agencies, public relations firms and government contracting firms.

PATROL is a broadly integrated solution that through a continuous improvement process enables the rapid deployment of advanced service level management. The continuous improvement process not only enables businesses to measure service in terms of end-user response time of business transactions and publish reports on compliance against SLAs, but it also allows for automated diagnosis of the root cause of failures and prediction of the impact of business change on the quality of service delivered.