It’s only been four months since Compuware launched the
latest iteration of its application monitoring software — Vantage
9 —
but officials released a point upgrade Monday to give IT managers a business
perspective on the bandwidth consumed by a network.
The Detroit-based software company’s Vantage 9.1 adds to the capabilities of
9.0
by drilling deeper into the application to see exactly which application
component or protocol is hogging the enterprise’s bandwidth — and puts a
dollar
figure on the costs.
Take, for example, the corporate e-mail application. In version 9.0, the
software monitor would tell the IT department only that
Outlook
was eating up 40 percent of the available bandwidth. With 9.1, IT can look
at
the individual components running the application and see that it’s the
Microsoft Exchange application that’s actually causing the problems. This helps them
solve
the problem much faster.
Lloyd Bloom, a product manager at Compuware, said taking that application
congestion and translating it into a reason for business-minded department
heads
to change their business processes is what sets this Vantage release apart
from
its predecessor.
“If I’m an IT guy talking to a business guy about reducing LAN
bandwidth, you’re going to be hard-pressed to understand why it is I should
do
that, and understand the cost implication of that,” he told
internetnews.com. “But if I can sit down with them and have a dialog
based upon the business application and their cost as it’s running down the
wire, I
might make them understand the implications.”
Another distinguishing element in Vantage 9.1 is the best practices modeled
into
the code that deal with changing network environments, like migrating an
operating system platform based on Windows over to Linux or consolidating
servers in the wake of an acquisition. Compuware has modeled its code to
take
the best practices learned from existing customers and pass them along to new
customers.
“When you change the infrastructure, it’s hard to predict the impact on
application performance, so you want to be very structured in how you go
about
making the changes,” Bloom said.
Officials also pointed out the benefits of software that keeps tabs on the
applications in use throughout the network, notably personal applications by
employees that eat into critical business application use or the effect of a
virus on a particular application.
Vantage 9.1 also ties into Compuware’s strategy on services-oriented
architectures (SOA), the latest buzzword among software and middleware
providers
these days. SOAs expand on (but aren’t dependent upon) Web services
capabilities by putting a network’s applications and processes on one
platform,
each able to communicate with the other. Vantage fits under Compuware’s SOA
umbrella by giving IT managers an end-user perspective on the demands
individual
applications place on the network infrastructure.
Compuware last week unveiled its Uniface 8.4
toolset, featuring new functionality for letting companies build an
SOA
on their networks.
