Candle bundles WebSphere management

Company offers software, services to help users implement and manage IBM's product line.

EL SEGUNDO, CALIF. - Candle this week will introduce software and services designed to help companies more easily deploy and manage IBM's WebSphere application server and middleware products.

Candle's PathWAI portfolio includes nine offerings that it says can help customers better deploy and implement. IBM's WebSphere family of which includes integration broker, portal, e-commerce and application server software. Candle developed tools to monitor the performance and availability of IBM's software, and the company designed services to support users looking to deploy IBM WebSphere tools.

PathWAI Architecture for WebSphere would help users who are just starting to implement WebSphere by offering network design consulting and some software tools. PathWAI Monitor for WebSphere MQ, on the other hand, works for customers already using the WebSphere MQ middleware, which sits between front-end Web servers and back-end systems serving as a messenger between the two. The package monitors the MQ software to ensure its performance and sends data to Candle's dashboard application, a Web-based interface that shows events, status, alerts and the like, or to consoles by other management vendors.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

EL SEGUNDO, CALIF. - Candle this week will introduce software and services designed to help companies more easily deploy and manage IBM's WebSphere application server and middleware products.

Candle's PathWAI portfolio includes nine offerings that it says can help customers better deploy and implement. IBM's WebSphere family of which includes integration broker, portal, e-commerce and application server software. Candle developed tools to monitor the performance and availability of IBM's software, and the company designed services to support users looking to deploy IBM WebSphere tools.

PathWAI Architecture for WebSphere would help users who are just starting to implement WebSphere by offering network design consulting and some software tools. PathWAI Monitor for WebSphere MQ, on the other hand, works for customers already using the WebSphere MQ middleware, which sits between front-end Web servers and back-end systems serving as a messenger between the two. The package monitors the MQ software to ensure its performance and sends data to Candle's dashboard application, a Web-based interface that shows events, status, alerts and the like, or to consoles by other management vendors.

The other products in the portfolio can help users manage everything from the testing and tuning of an application before rollout to generating historical reports of how well WebSphere performed.

Meta Group analyst Corey Ferengul says Candle's experience with IBM-specific networks - the company has been a partner with IBM for about 20 years - and its PathWAI portfolio help ease the use and administration of WebSphere tools. More importantly, he says, the PathWAI packages can let users more easily integrate front-end Web applications.

Take AXA Financial in New York. The company, which offers insurance and brokerage services via the Web to about 220,000 policy holders, uses PathWAI Dashboard for WebSphere MQ and PathWAI Monitor for WebSphere MQ to tie front-end Web applications to data in legacy systems. AXA Senior Vice President and CTO Don Buskard says AXA salespeople must access those systems constantly, and PathWAI lets them do so without his IT team having to write and rewrite software. In AXA's case, Candle software sits on the server with the WebSphere MQ middleware software and monitors its performance, sending alerts to a central management console when problems occur and giving network managers a view of the MQ systems activity.

"Candle allowed us to bolt on new technology on our front end so employees and customers can get at that back-end data in real time," Buskard says. He says Candle made the process of integrating AXA's mainframe elements with newer technology simple. And the software from Candle helps him monitor all the components from one console.

Ferengul says Candle's strength lies in managing IBM products, but the company must expand its software to cover products from vendors such as BEA Systems, Oracle, Tibco and WebMethods. And Candle must be aware of the growing competition IBM's own Tivoli management software division represents; the company has its own Tivoli Management for WebSphere software.