Vendor improves apps management formula

MCLEAN, VA. - Managed Objects next week will unveil software that promises to help companies better manage applications, but that may require more upfront work than some customers can spare.

The new edition of the company's flagship Formula software can store the sort of data that earlier versions could correlate from other management systems, letting customers track service levels of network devices and applications over time rather than just in real time. Companies can use Version 3.0, like previous versions, to make sense of incoming data on everything from server response time to application usage collected by products such as Computer Associates' Unicenter, IBM/Tivoli's NetView and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView software.

Also new is a Formula application called Business Service Analyzer that uses performance information about applications and network infrastructure to help companies understand how different applications affect each other under various conditions. For example, the software could let a customer know how its online trading application affects its quote delivery application at peak times, perhaps signaling the customer to provide more bandwidth or server resources to the quote delivery program. The new application costs about $50,000.

"These new features will enable us to analyze the historical performance of overall services such as equities trading, along with technology components such as servers," says Gerald Foy, director of enterprise management for IT consulting firm CSC in El Segundo, Calif.

Foy has used Formula products for about two years and says the software correlates data from HP, CA, BMC Software and IBM tools that CSC uses to manage 22,000 desktops, 1,200 Unix servers, 600 NetWare servers and 2,200 legacy applications. CSC says using Managed Objects software saved it from integrating applications itself, a project that the company estimates would have cost $5 million. (Formula costs from $250,000 to $400,000.)

Although effective once deployed, Formula requires quite a bit of upfront work to get started, one analyst warned. "If users buy a product [such as Formula], they must be prepared to configure it. Users must understand perfectly what the applications in their infrastructure are and how they are connected," says Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst with Giga Information Group. He says "mature" IT managers can garner results from tools such as Formula, but if the "IT person doesn't understand what they want from their business application" the product won't have much use.

Bill Gassman, an analyst with Gartner, agrees that Formula is for "leading-edge" companies that understand how IT affects their business applications and ultimately, the bottom line. Managed Objects has been able to differentiate itself from others, such as Tivoli, through broader integration with other vendors' offerings.

Formula consists of server software that runs on Windows NT, Linux and Unix, and provides reports via a Web-based console. It uses custom adapters and XML to communicate with other management tools.