Newcomer Optinuity has its eye on helping network executives speed problem resolution, instill better processes and more efficiently manage IT operations. The company this week is expected to unveil software that documents and automates existing manual procedures.

Optinuity says its C2O offering will help automate IT production tasks ranging from running batch jobs, to rebooting a server to troubleshooting application performance problems. The centralized server software monitors and measures actual tasks against pre-defined models of IT processes and jobs by using data collected by software agents distributed on application, Web and other production servers across an enterprise data center. C2O uses proxy servers to monitor actions on routers and other devices onto which software agents cannot be installed.

The software lets Mike Evans, a C2O beta tester and CIO at the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission in Oklahoma City, allocate staff resources to more important IT jobs. In the past, he says his staff of 47 depended on paper flowcharts that detailed processing jobs that had to be run to support the state agency's unemployment claims, tax collection and other applications. Previously, he would have to assign a systems administrator to work overnight and monitor if a job ran accurately.

"Mainly we need to know jobs are being run in the correct order, and the software helps us automate the scheduling and eliminated the human error we experienced when jobs ran out of order," he says. "As a state agency, that's important because we don't have a lot of extra money to pay personnel."

The software also works in his heterogeneous environment, which includes a Bull mainframe that he says might not have been easy to manage with software from the likes of IBM, one of Optinuity's potential competitors. Mercury Interactive and its IT governance product line could represent another competitor down the road for the Bethesda, Md., start-up. Like Optinuity, Mercury includes features in its application management software that let IT managers incorporate their knowledge of a product to deal with future automated resolutions.

Pricing starts at $150,000 for a typical multi-server application environment consisting of 10 to 12 CPUs.