IT automation vendors last week upgraded their software platforms to help customers process jobs and manage workloads more efficiently across heterogeneous networks.

The common theme in upgrades for the products - OpTier's CoreFirst and Optinuity's C2O - is more detailed policy and process definition, which the vendors say will help their customers better automate manual work such as running batch jobs across mainframe and distributed environments.

Industry watchers say these types of operations automation products can help IT managers improve application and service performance, and ensure service levels are met by monitoring the supporting systems.

OpTier's CoreFirst 1.4 requires IT managers to install a central data repository on a dedicated server and to distribute agents on managed Web, database and application servers. Customers must set the policies they want the software to use via a Web-based interface, which also serves as a management interface and reporting tool. Once deployed, CoreFirst discovers how applications traverse the network and use the managed devices, and the agents monitor the transaction workloads on the servers.

For example, an IT manager would prioritize the top five applications for the company. The agents would monitor the workload on the servers used by those applications, and when a transaction associated with the prioritized applications competed for compute resources with another transaction, the CoreFirst agents would allocate resources to the higher priority applications ahead of other transactions.

In this release, OpTier also added support for corporate applications such as SAP NetWeaver Application Server and SAP NetWeaver Portal, which the company says can "provide visibility into legacy SAP system connections." The upgrade also supports WebSphere and WebLogic portals. CoreFirst 1.4 includes enhanced policy management control and broader protocol support, including Java messaging service. IBM AS/400 connectivity also is new to this release.

"After identifying the elements of a complex transaction, firms must optimize the entire system that supports that transaction," says Jean-Pierre Garbani, a vice president at Forrester Research, about OpTier's release of CoreFirst 1.4. "CoreFirst performs three functions required by a modern service-oriented architecture," which Garbani explains are dependency analysis, monitoring and optimization.