Managed Objects offers business service management

MCLEAN, VA. - Managed Objects this week is set to announce two software products designed to tell network executives how well end-user applications perform and let them correlate data from disparate, third-party sources, respectively.

The software, Business Experience Manager and Business Data Integrator, are add-ons to the company's flagship Formula business service management (BSM) software. BSM products track the performance and availability of network components that support an application.

BSM products promise to correlate how business services perform based on how well the network infrastructure responds to and supports applications, and to give network executives a heads up when network problems could affect service delivery to internal end users or external customers.

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.

MCLEAN, VA. - Managed Objects this week is set to announce two software products designed to tell network executives how well end-user applications perform and let them correlate data from disparate, third-party sources, respectively.

The software, Business Experience Manager and Business Data Integrator, are add-ons to the company's flagship Formula business service management (BSM) software. BSM products track the performance and availability of network components that support an application.

BSM products promise to correlate how business services perform based on how well the network infrastructure responds to and supports applications, and to give network executives a heads up when network problems could affect service delivery to internal end users or external customers.

Formula consists of server software that runs on Windows NT, Linux and Unix, and provides reports via a Web-based console. It uses custom software adapters and XML to communicate with other management tools. The most recent packages will offer enterprise network managers a more complete picture of how applications perform across their networks, the company says.

Business Experience Manager will let network managers perform synthetic testing, or simulate one or many end-user transactions to calculate how a network will respond. It also will let network managers capture end-user data at the browser level and track response times for each transaction in a multitransaction application. Business Data Integrator will let network managers define and inter-relate business metrics, such as total sales calls or Web site hits, with network element performance. The two new adapters run on top of Formula. An average enterprise implementation of Formula with adapters can cost about $100,000.

Click to see: Problem spotters

Besides Managed Objects, big network and systems management companies such as BMC Software, Computer Associates, HP, IBM Tivoli and Mercury Interactive offer products to track application performance and correlate it directly to predefined business drivers. And while these companies, with their deep pockets and marketing efforts, could help educate enterprise network executives about BSM, the software still cannot be justified in many corporate IT departments.

BSM products still require customers to manually configure the software upon deployment, says Debra Curtis, a research director with Gartner. Because it tracks application performance across multiple network components, BSM also requires that corporate networks have solid configuration and change-management processes in place to accurately track the changes in infrastructure components, Curtis says.

"You have to have a really clear business driver to justify the investment in the software and the cost, time and resources it takes to deploy it," she says.

But Curtis adds that Managed Objects, by offering specific adapters - which are software applications developed to perform specific tasks and feed the data back to Formula - could help enterprise IT departments deploy parts of BSM in a step-by-step process.